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.

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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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