Peter Douglas • Poems in Our Pockets (for Corinne)

We wore baked pumpkins,
spitted on our heads.
We felt the seeds
and lapped up their stickiness
with our nails.

The moon was slippery
and climbed like fireflies
out from between our
scummy fingers.

We drank decent, novice cocktails,
and you touched my wrist,
like a child who remembers
her mother at the last second
and runs inside to hug her before
leaving for school.

I had not known you had milk
chocolate in your chest,
but you breathed and I felt your pulse
and looked like a boy at your breasts.

No one knows this about you,
or me.

Roy Schwartzman • Winter Coherences Along Myrtle Beach

Clouds snake lazy S curves,
aerial reflections
of washboard sand beds
rippling backwash streams
after high tide.
Underfoot, you feel the little ridges
through the soles of your shoes,
watch tidal tendrils worm seaward.

Dyspeptic Baudelaire went wrong somewhere,
never quite digesting separate essences
that should have mingled
unshaken, unstirred
between ideal and spleen.

Old men, hip boots and headphones
who know enough grammar
and have the pedigree to spell South
with a capital S,
sweep the beaches with metal detectors
as if the shore were one giant minefield.
Fully insulated
they exhume relics,
scoop up piles of sand-caked fictions
their children can plunder.

We lunge across the puddles
we used to jump into,
don jackboots so we never
ever
have to walk beaches barefoot.