Inspired by “The Sleepless Ones” by Lawrence Tirnauer

What if every lonely person stood at the edge of the city
at the same time, to find that soft lip
of sand and each other?
Yesterday, I left the silver box of my home.
The sky uncontained, indigo, and pooling
like ink in my throat. The store at the end of Cabrillo closed.
Not closed, I mean gone. A patina of hush.
I watched the thin green waves breaking.
The streaked windows where the store had been
made picture frames around the waves. The ocean was going
on without us, and I was glad. Then, the waves bashed in the windows,
pouring froth around our ankles–me and all the others who walked to the edge
of the continent, all the people waiting for the bus,
the kids eating sandwiches on the hexagon of grass by the beach.
Fish sputtered around us like bursts of lightning in the shallows, then seeped
toward the deeper blue. The children lost their sandwiches in the waves,
but we laughed together. Seagulls called out from our lungs.

Nature’s intricacies inspire Carolyn Wilsey to write poems, sometimes surreal ones. Her poems appear in Pretty Owl Poetry, Rogue Agent, Stirring, Eclectica, The Virginia Normal, West Marin Review, Quiet Lightning, and other publications. Her work was nominated for The Best of the Net Anthology and is forthcoming in PANK. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College.

Madeline Hollander (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is an artist who works with performance, video, and installation to explore how human movement and body language negotiate their limits within everyday systems of technology, intellectual property law, and daily ritual. Her work presents continuously looping events that intervene within spatial, psychological, and temporal landscapes and engage with alternate modes of viewership, replication, and archiving. Hollander earned a BA from Barnard College of Columbia University and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2021); the Visual Arts Center, University of Austin, Texas (2021); Bortolami, NY (2020); the Artist’s Institute, NY (2018); Bosse & Baum, UK (2017); and SIGNAL, Brooklyn, NY (2016). Her work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2019); the Aldrich Museum, CT (2020); Helsinki Contemporary, Finland (2019); Serpentine Galleries, UK (2018); the Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2019); and the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2017). Upcoming projects include the Performa Biennial 2021 in NYC and ARCH Athens, Greece, 2022.