Tag: beach

Four Poems by Hilary Sideris

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Treatment

If not for that need
I took for love & then

that shove, I wouldn’t have
married & divorced &

owed five years
of maintenance to my ex-

spouse whose accent
I found sexy till I didn’t.

I wouldn’t have been awake
at 3 AM to see that bug

traverse our coverlet
& watch the blood—mine?

his?—gush as I crushed it
between finger & thumb.

The toxic squad
wouldn’t have come &

sprayed our bed, treatment
for which I also paid.

*

Testosterone

Ground down like a soft
graphite stub in a hand-turned

sharpener, at night I count
backwards to the beginning

of divorce till boredom
overcomes remorse. How many

have been fired since cancer
research stalled? Fools in charge

confuse transgenic mice with
transgender men. My lawyer

Venmos a reminder to replenish
his retainer. U-Haul boxes

accrue dust, pile up like debts
beside my bed. Should I have

tried testosterone, purchased
a magnifying mirror, plucked

my upper lip & wanted sex
with my husband?

*

Shove

My cute nephew, a studious child,
has joined a frat, lifts weights,

drinks protein shakes. Last week
he shoved his mother when she

got up in his face—my little sister
isn’t asking for advice. I offer none.

Now’s not the time to say the man
I married hit his mom. What’s

worse, a husband or son’s shove?
She hopes he finds a girlfriend soon.

* 

Boomer Beach

I’ve only met you once,
for Thai, but you live on a beach
& I watch waves to meditate,
so I lie to my therapist,
drive to your gated community.
The surf, gnarly before an early

Nor’easter, churns up the Jersey
shore, its seawall higher, reinforced
since Hurricane Sandy. I take a picture—
not of us—of the wild rose hips,
their easy sway that says we’re all
fair game, but we’re still here.

After two glasses of Sancerre,
you talk at length about containing
hydrogen—not arrogance, I think,
just a man lost in his work.
You say you levitated in your youth,
show me a star-shaped scar

in your left palm, stitches between
finger & thumb, tell me about
the house in the California hills
you didn’t want to sell,
but the wildfires
burned closer every year.

*

Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016) and Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada, 2014). Originally from Indiana and a longtime Brooklyn resident, she is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program within the City University of New York.

Three Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Ballet Class

I tried not to envy the ponytailed waifs
in my ballet class whose ten-year-old bodies
weighed less than dandelions.

I was as thin as they were, but my limbs
were like lead weights compared
to the willow branches of their arms, the bird-

like bones in legs that seemed stronger,
lighter—able to pirouette and plié
with so much ease. At least I make good grades

in school, I’d say to myself while holding
on to the barre like a ship’s mainmast
in a roiling sea. But I knew the ballet teachers

expected better of me—the only daughter
of a Prima Ballerina. It didn’t take long,
however, to see I had none of my mother’s talent.

I would never leap into the air and land like a swan
on the water, dip and sway like a sapling
in the wind. Though I liked wearing the black

leotard and pink tights, my soft, peony-colored
shoes, I couldn’t bend and touch
my toes, let alone twirl on them. So I shed

the ballet slippers and took up writing—
hoping to pen one day, a pirouetting poem,
a pas de chat of words that danced across a page.

*

Woman on the Beach

The woman pacing the rocky beach is no ghost
but a mother whose little boy rose
from his bed and wandered down to the water

while his parents were sleeping. Not quite three,
her only child was red-cheeked and plump
as a baby penguin, with black curls and a winning

smile that made his mother’s heart thump
in her thin chest just to think of it. She knew
he was gone but year after year she rented the same

cottage on the same shore on the same day her boy
disappeared—presumed drowned they said—
and now she is old. Widowed, white-headed

and frail, her body is blown this way and that by
the wind, but still she walks and sometimes
calls his name as if any minute, he’ll come running,

his flushed skin hot against her own cool flesh,
wriggling like a puppy that wants down but she will
not put him down. She will hold him

in her arms and keep him safe like she didn’t do
before, though nothing she says or does
or prays for will ever wake her from a sleep so deep

she never heard his feet hit the floor or the screen
door slam or his cries for help, her beautiful
boy whose mother failed him.

* 

How to Shop with Your Mother

Never make her feel like she’s slowing
you down. Even when she meanders

into the shoe department, running her
hands over the soft leather, admiring

one pair or another for what seems like
forever, you do have time to wait. Then,

when the funeral director tells you they
need clothes for her to wear, a pair of

shoes, you will not open your mother’s
closet door and find, jumbled into a pile,

her worn out sandals, dress shoes with
dented heels, her faded thin-soled flats—

and feel such a wave of sorrow you can’t
catch your breath. You won’t be the one

who hurried her mother along, who kept
on sighing because she was holding you

up when there were so many places you
needed to go and things you needed to do.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

Down the Shore by Robbi Nester

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Down the Shore

Every summer when our un-airconditioned house
grew too hot to bear, when we stuck to the sofa’s
plastic cover and wanted to avoid the city pool
packed with adolescents acting stupid on the diving
board, we headed down the shore to dawdle
on the Boardwalk, play Pachuco, eat fish and chips
and hotdogs on a stick. We’d lie prone on sand
studded with used hypodermics and plastic waste,
and watch the white horse prodded up the rump
jump off Steel Pier into gray waves. Sometimes
we’d pile into a wicker rolling car and pedal to
the Planters Peanut Stand, grab a bag of freshly
roasted nuts. Evenings, we’d watch the phosphorescent
waves roll in, then catch a tiny purple jitney to the
boarding house, windows wide open to the ocean breeze.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at RobbiNester.net

Five poems by Joanna Milstein

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Halloween Party

When you called I told you all about the party on Halloween.

About the cape and the pearls and the fishnets and the fangs.

About the men who asked me to dance to the slow songs.
The handsome one who showed me around the haunted house and let me, tender me, spooked by suspended skeletons and disposable ghouls, grab his arm.

That I woke up at 6 a.m. the next morning
between the grey satin sheets of a stranger.

What I didn’t say is that I stayed at home alone on Halloween.
Listening to public radio in my pjs.
That at midnight I ate the last bag of candy that the trick-or-treaters hadn’t picked up outside my door.

That yours was the last number I’ve dialed in weeks.

That I’ve been sick all autumn.

*

Red birds

The voices of the red birds invade my house at dawn chirping and fluttering.
They ask so many questions that I cannot answer.
I am mute until dusk.
I have a mouth but not until the inky darkness does it dare to whisper.
I want to chant the quiet things but I am tone-deaf.
I long for a new voice.
A voice content to be alive.
Grateful to hear the birds hum each morning.
With that voice I could join the dawn chorus
I could soar like the immortal birds.
I could respond instead of just listening.
And with that voice I could sing.
With that voice I could sing you a song.

*

Beach witness

I walk for the wet silence
And the non-manmade noises
The unheard and the untranslatable.
Only available Tuesday evenings after seven.
But please don’t tell.
Families have gone home and it is just me and the vanishing light and the roll of the short waves up and down and up again.
I step over electric blue latex gloves and a plastic fork and a razor blade and a supermarket bag and a Barbie doll and an empty bottle of bleach.
A soaked branch decays. A black feather shivers.
Nature kills nature all the time and no one complains.
Fingerprints and footprints dissolve when the tide rises.
Scars fade but never disappear.
The gulls are crying and the prehistoric birds extend their wings to dry as washed linen on a clothesline.
You told me once that horseshoe crabs cure leprosy but their carcasses also listen when you tell them your secrets.
Dead things make great confidants.
Green sea glass sparkles, edges softened by the hand of time.
Crabs like spiders crawl on fuzzy rocks.
Did you know that female spiders kill their male partners after mating? I learned this in biology.
You always told me I was bad at science.
The tide is low and the sea has hemorrhaged rusty red seaweed and artificial possessions and the blue-grey detritus of dreams.
The ocean breathes in and out
I try to breathe like that, I like how it makes me feel.
Tide pools brim with new life, things are reincarnated there.
Streams feed a thirsting sea.
Maybe you were a brilliant scientist,
but you were a terrible father.
My sandals gently crush a graveyard of white seashells.
They crackle under my feet like crepitation in the bony joints of cruel old men.
The sand flies hum, shells become sand.
The flecks live forever. Their tiny ears hear everything and their little eyes have seen the manmade deeds that lie at the foot of the wakeful seabed.
Teeth eat flesh but hard things disintegrate, too.
Everything devolves.
Everything becomes wet dust.
I believe in the eternal silence of beaches.
So many secrets shared between me and infinite particles.
They whisper:
We know we know we know we know we know we know we know we know we know.

*

Night traveler

Last night I traveled to Brazil
forced to navigate the rainforest
I stopped a friendly stranger for directions
struggling with a guide to basic Portuguese.
The heat nearly felled me, the thirst torturous, I opened my mouth and let the rain drip past my tongue down to my parched tonsils.
You were there, too.
Arm in arm we penetrated the forest’s dark canopy.
Together we wrestled man-eating tropical plants and gargantuan snakes,
You stole perspiry kisses, pushing my back against king-sized kapoks.

I awake covered in sweat.
Not from struggling with anacondas but from this miserable cold
my passport still in the drawer next to the four-poster bed.
I reach instead for Robitussin to soothe my throat, Advil to cool my torrid temperature.
No need to brush up my Portuguese.
I’m not sure which is farther, you or Brazil.
I don’t even like hiking.
And I lost you a long time ago.

*

Scheherazade for one night

If you stay I won’t ask questions. I’ll tell you stories, she said.
I’ll weave a quilt with them, I’ll tattoo our earth with rainbows.

And so she told him about mythical creatures and cold seas and spirits who haunt and others who don’t and kings and traveling salesmen and warm-blooded fish and fishermen and manipulative genies and healing herbs and poisons and stone souls and mermaids and an automaton and grief and prophetic dreams and blooming jasmine and secret languages and purple skies and apple trees and lovers and peripatetic courtiers and long suppers in the fourteenth century. About rewards. About women who lie with men and those who lie to them. About so many selves.

But in the morning he left anyway.

She stayed home, listening to their music, her footsteps caressing the carpet where his soles once danced.

*

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Joanna Milstein is a New York-based writer. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2019. She holds a PhD in History from the University of St Andrews. Her most recent short story is included in the winter 2021 issue of The Writing Disorder. She is currently working on her first novel.