Alone, they remain:
the last citadel, the first mother.

She shoves him upward:
a final, gasping breath.
The sea, inky & roiling,
closes over
her body long rotten.

Palms cupped
in a last supplication
she bares him
to the bloodstained sky;
an offering, a prayer,
a presentation.

Behold,
and he is crowned
king of the midnight waves.
His subject: the drowned
past, which haunts him still.
Under the lethal sun,
he glimmers,
bedecked in rust and regret.

His mother’s fingers,
rocky and scarred,
entreat to him the open sky.
He lunges toward it,
a spine of metal spires
bristling into the emptiness,
It is all he has left;
he has wrecked his inheritance
and dressed himself
in rags of faded rumination.

He writhes in her grasp,
twisting and clawing.
He gouges chunks of her stone skin.
He flays her of her final forests.
He is desperate. He wants
more, but she has already
given everything.
Her breasts are sucked dry,
her milk sacrificed
to the monstrous ocean, which swells
with the menace of the forgotten
come for revenge.

She weeps acid tears
onto her final legacy:
a scrapyard of sorrow,
scraps of dignity,
scrappy youths screaming
from her hands’ nestle
into the dead world.

The tide is rising;
still she thrusts higher
in a final, gasping plea.
Her son thrashes and tantrums
surrounded by destruction, her own
destructured corpse.