I.

   Once the sea shifted swell, flush, afraid:
   I don't want to be, and alone
 
   and though not hungry, the sea starved.
   Story tells she tore a seam,
 
   spilled the contents of her stomach
   to shore til her mouth was clean—

   as in removal or erasure, not unsoiled.
   Her molecules unbloomed mountains,
 
   flayed them to swarming blossoms
   of rock-then-mineral. Cities levelled,
 
   dust unsettled, and storms ghosted
   into one another, unable to see.
 

II.

   As omens go, doorways are dangerous:
   the sea subbed a missive for permission,

   restitched the sutures.  In or out
   or in-between histories gone missing—

   What of the squid? (Ink in drams.)
   The starfish? (Constellation compassed.)
 
   She didn't bother with banishing,
   with undoing; she just disastered.
 
   Debris regrafted tenuously, at first,
   to form New Earth, then fossilized.
 
   Storms tethered together to unwither
   where the sea had wrecked.
 

III.

   Survivors didn’t believe the beginning
   so simple, so selfish—briny suicide,
 
   untide decided. Some rebuilt.
   Others fight or flighted
 
   and everything began again,
   as it always has, as it always
 
   will: with doorways, with leaving.
   Can't trespass without a boundary,
 
   can't abandon without erasure.
   The sea's fallen from our stories,

   the sky's taken a vow of silence—