Summer Remains a Poem I Can't Write
By Bonnie Jill Emanuel
Low tide I wander Paine-Hollow Cove over & again to see the dolphin carcass nestling weeks now in the hummock grass has eyes eaten out by shore birds. Its ribcage exposed bones white like milkweed. How the humidity keeps us in its grief. Gnats eddy How my hair coils. Shoal as a verb means to make shallow but an inlet at any tide is a poem of fullness unwritten sun-bleached beach plums cattail spikes & the toxic salve of the butterfly weed. Diamondback terrapin box turtles make a home here too—for a time—I read so in The Gazette & how they stretch their heads up from under the seawater mudflat when it rains to drink. I am only a stretching August shape—there is no word for this although pages are places we make shadows. All of us only visitors. My body under the sun makes a tall mute slant / passes across small mounds of mollusks & rotting red algae-tangles in the sandbar.
Bonnie Jill Emanuel's poems appear in American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Ruminate, Laurel Review, Love's Executive Order, Chiron Review, Midwest Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York where she received the 2020 Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the 2017 Stark Poetry Prize in memory of Raymond Patterson. Bonnie is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a poetry reader for Bellevue Literary Review.
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