The Beach in the Nineties

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

after Luke Beesley

Kids, more wave than still.

A rush of clamour,

sand churning with games.

Wind pinks skin; zinc

neons nose. Sun

blinks on the peak of spume,

rippling toward collapse,

swallowing liminal steps.

Up above, a hole opens

in our collective

consciousness. Too small

to close it. Beached

seaweed smells of

the beyond, the drench.

No plastic island, not yet.

A decade opens into grunge

and we lunge out of cut-off jeans

and plunge neck deep into freeze:

all the ways we revel, blossoming

melanomas of hormones and skinny

at the lip. Crusted with salt,

shivering   with excitement.

SCOTT-PATRICK MITCHELL won the 2023 XYZ Prize for Innovation in Spoken Word and was Highly Commended in The 2024 Blake Poetry Prize. Their debut poetry collection Clean (Upswell Publishing, 2022) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the WA Premier’s Book Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.