Summer 2021: Day at the Beach.

by Bruce E.R. Thompson.

And then we find, quite unexpectedly,

a sanguine time and place unspoiled by crowds.

Instead there is the whispering of the sea,

those insubstantial castles in the clouds,

the cries of gulls bedazzling the waves,

the sand and sun, the sky in sapphire blue,

and earnest children (one without a shoe)

constructing citadels, dredging out caves,

and sorting through a pirate’s treasure chest

of stones and shells, rinsed free of sandy grime.

Don’t begrudge the tide its foreordained conquest

of moats and turrets. Ours is the final jest:

such days, like love, exist outside of time,

and, for their sake, we tolerate the rest.

by Joseph Harms. He watched himself as one’d a foe, at best a corvine snowed, where flake and vane meet awake at times to scop the foresttop alluvia (the phatic all): Oh, fey heart of this and that! oh, gay old sometime! the thinnest know, untether hunger wonderful. / The aqueduct that rachises from holt […]

by Frederick Pollack. Spent half the voyage throwing up. May even have lost weight. The face reluctantly seen bending over the sink in my cabin had lost all hue but that of rosacea. However, by the time we docked I had gotten my sea legs, and stood on deck in sweaters and backpack with the […]

by Barry Vitcov. I’d like to believe in mermaids any myth actually comforting thoughts and desires requires imagination and a willingness to forgive rationality and lust When you emerged from the sea shimmering with hope and possibility my willingness washed away like temporary sand castles absorbed back into former memories Which aren’t really what they […]

by Jeff Schiff. and release two hunch and hand blow locals you name them Grumman dinghy puddled morning doomy skies moored atop spatterdock that predawn pulling from warm sheets that giving over to cold chop and whitecaps to walleye to perch and channel cat who don’t measure up yet somehow do

by Ron Singer. 1. If an offshore rock is washed by a wave, and the wave, outgoing, like a hand, scoops sand over the rock, sure, water and sand (and salt, sun, and wind) over a time, concertedly, turn rock to sand. II. If a cloud sails past out toward the sea, and people on […]