EXCERPTS

Adolescence on Lake Huron

Sand, between my fingers
as I grope for my shirt.

I fold the arm back in,
lean up on my elbows.
Squint into the brightness of the beach.

I push upward
until my ass is resting on my ankles,
glance at Sarah.

I can see the scars on her arm
showing themselves off to the sun.
I remember when she put them there.

I turn toward the boardwalk.
Children are screaming and laughing.
Children scream because they think screaming is funny.

I can almost see my mother
in a lawn chair further down.
She’d sit at the edge,
her feet getting buried in the goopy grain,
but she’s just had knee surgery,

and is still healing.

I can smell her wounds stinging
from where I’m sitting,
like bactine
in an infection of my own.

I look back at Sarah.
Breathe in her raspberry body lotion.
She's sitting up now,
her dark forearms crossed over her stomach.
Strands of brown, black and auburn
diving off into her pony tail.

She doesn't know she's beautiful,
and neither do I, really.
So close that I can see all of her
clogged pores .
I almost believe that
she's not perfect.

I mean to tell her that she's wrong
about herself,
but I've forgotten where I am.
What with scents, and sand,
and memories of other people's pain.

But we have made ourselves a new home,
I remind myself.
On these beach towels, on this flowered sheet
where we both feel comfortable in our bikinis.

There’s a breeze and silence.
I smell air;
just air for a moment.

Then a wave drops itself onto the shore,
I hear children again,
and I resent the water for its persistence

-Katie Romeo

New York Street with Moon

After Georgia O'Keeffe

To love it is to love cubism, streets on a grid,
angles, corners, circumstances.
New York is a microcosm of itself.
I know its monuments the way I know
rain or the shape of my feet.
What to make of the streetlight as beacon
in this starless midnight city
where it is never dark enough to sleep?
What to make of the building, concise, hungry,
strutting into the foreground?
I was expecting a pile of bones, perhaps,
the inside of a flower, not this,
not a Manhattan street corner,
an ode to brown stone, with
a moon imported from Santa Fe.
All I can do is scrape at the sky.
Every building comes to a point
where it must close and sharpen.
Landscape leads to landscape,
a city in every brushstroke.

-Lilit Marcus