A gull squall lulls me to sea.

Are inland gulls missionaries? mercenaries? visionaries? vanguards? aliens? spies? runaways? draft dodgers? emigrants? interlopers? gulls?

Are inland gulls migrant workers? trespassers? settlers? conquerors? carpetbaggers? displaced people groups? gulls?

Are inland gulls explorers? indentured servants? penal colonists? seekers of religious freedom? emancipated slaves? native inlanders? gulls?

Are inland gulls overextended? Do they play outside themselves? Are they diluting their brand? Have they been drawn away from their core values?

The farthest inland I’ve ever lived was Charlottesville. Gulls there, too, or their cries.

Gulls’ squalls. Seagulls’ snow squalls.

Squalls: the heavy, sudden rain brought on by gulls, rain you can see through as through experience.

I hear gulls in squeaks & shrieks & in a distant, screaming child. Gulls mewing down alleys, too. The pull, the squalor of gulls’ squalls.

Why does the gull squall so? “That gull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.” – Hamlet

“There’s another: why may not that be the gull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his squalls?” – Hamlet

The thunderhead passed; Azure reburied the squall skull.

Skulduggery: I buried the gull skull in sand.

To hang in place over your beach lunch, a gull makes up to 14,537 adjustments a minute. That’s why you leave something.

Our gulls roar overhead all July, jets intersecting tide, intercepting time, picking off eyes and the glints of wriggling scale.

On our way to Mull, the sullen gull, never full, culled through our brill, then skulked about the hull.

All words’ etymology: the cry. The mother of all words.

All words’ Eve: the wail, the holler, the pull. The squalor of gulls’ squalls.


“Trill” are my Twitters. Tweet suites from @slowreads.