This was her eighties’ playlist. Deception Bay

mudflats, that brown tooth intersecting the Gold

& Sunshine Coasts’ polished smile. The quicksand

mire soft as a sea slug’s skin that bored kids poked

at in a tidal pool’s watery prison yard. Occasionally

a whale blob or baby shark left behind for dead; a

wounded gang member in a robbery gone wrong.

It’s terror disarmed by death’s arrest. & jellyfish

blooms she recorded, when the pacific heaved

thousands of spineless, translucent brains onto

the flats, seeding the beach with blue landmines.

The forced perspective of her memory making

the swarms shield the entire foreshore in bubble

wrap like a giant art installation or an album cover.