Far beyond town, high atop white cliffs,
in three old houses that undulate with the wind,
three loners live on the edge of the sea.

In the first house: a fat man with four black cats,
a rusty typewriter, and the hiss of surf far below.
Clicking and clacking an epic no one will read,

he sits on his plush tush in a kingdom of words.
Ink, Coal, Pitch and Shadow shift positions
and likely think him mad. The townspeople do.

In the second house dodders a wizened crone
and her foul-smelling cauldron of tinctures,
her long, bony fingers brittle as kindling.

Her pet ferret runs circles around the brew,
claws at her skirt for attention, for Icicle knows
the witch can’t see him, can’t hear him.

Like a ghostly apparition, she cackles randomly.
The townspeople claim she’s two hundred years old,
surviving on mold spores and sea-salt.

In the third house: a self-proclaimed shaman,
a hairless albino with pink eyes, a brocaded robe,
and Bliss, a goat with a never-ending supply of milk.

He wasn’t always a holy man, didn’t always have visions.
A tumble down the rocks, a dent in his head, and everything
changed but the townspeople’s wicked opinions.

Loners, the three nod when crossing paths,
consider their grouping a kind of fate, a kind of magic,
what the shaman calls a festering accident.

In the woeful village, the townspeople hunt
for the next outcast, but fear disturbing the Trinity
balanced on the edge of the sea, the smoky green sea.

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Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor for Dos Gatos Press of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Bearing the Mask, and 22 Poems and a Prayer for El Paso. Poems have appeared very recently in Impossible Archetype, Rogue Agent, Anti-Heroin Chic, Panoply, and many others. His website is http://swig.tripod.com