All posts tagged: issue 25 poetry

Car Wash, Key Largo

By RICARDO PAU-LLOSA

2 Samuel 14:14

The soapy drench is physics drawn to river
toward me, 15 feet away in my flimsy
chair. At first its body fans to deliver
brims to concrete sinks I had not glimpsed,
then narrows to speed unveiling dips and bellies,
then courses on to a hole with a remnant pool
anchored by a cigar butt. A halt belies
its reaches. A lump has pushed the grey drool
around the promised lake in delta featherings
while another drive has passed beneath my seat
to rest in my colossal shadow, clearing
its slate of suds. The flow now ponds in the heat
and readies its ghost mirror to catch me, gray
in noon’s appraisals, the reaper of the day. 

Car Wash, Key Largo
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Near Murrell’s Inlet

By MORRI CREECH

The flatteries of the surf conspire to make
a stammering innuendo in the reeds.
The sun, splintered by the spume’s refractions,
sinks toward the west where it will disappear
in a violet streak above the evening dunes,
like mind considering the defeat of mind.
A cormorant in the distance breaks the surface
to wrestle a mullet from the sullen depths
farther below which no light penetrates.

Near Murrell’s Inlet
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Closure?

By CHRISTOPHER SPAIDE

Close your trap. Everyone you’ve ever lost lost
everything. Life’s closed. It’s not even close. At least

they aren’t distant. As if a stiff flick to existence

flung them unfetchably far to the shadiest suburbs
of substance, where no wintry entropy disturbs

Closure?
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