Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      May 2, 2022Swimmers in the CaribbeanChristine Degenaars

      after Susan Mitchell

      At a Starbucks
      on Union Avenue, it rains
      and a stranger closes his eyes
       
      over me. I’d like to blame
      him for this, how much
      I am like a window now—
       
      it was a cab ride,
      those early years. We drove
      to Central Park, you pressed
       
      a piece of cloth to a cut
      on my heel, remember? Like oil,
      it shined in the car light.
       
      Come with me
      to Trinidad and Tobago
      you said. Your wife,
       
      your girls gone. Port of Spain,
      the air salted with spring—there
      you said the lime goes on
       
      forever. I saw us—
      beach hat and folding chairs,
      watch the ocean tag the shore,
       
      retreat. Ships in the bay
      bobbing like bucking horses,
      towels the color of sunset.
       
      You said at night we’d sit
      flushed with rum and cheap wine,
      side by side on the balcony,
       
      looking out—darkness
      like the hem of a sheer skirt.
      You in white
       
      linen and well into forty.
      My mother warned me:
      never love a man
       
      you can’t understand.
      Your teeth were a fence
      painted between
       
      your lips. I shouldn’t
      have believed you.
      Sometimes still, sometimes—
       
      love is a dark pool
      at the bottom of a dark well, or
      something else: refuse
       
      and rain water
      which take me back home.
      What I say, I say without
       
      mercy and what you said,
      listen to me—
      they were not songs.

      from #75 - Spring 2022

      Christine Degenaars

      “Violist and composer Kurt Rohde once said to me that all language is metaphor. It looks to obtain a shared understanding, a meeting of internal worlds, but it never quite gets there. To me, poetry is the closest we can get to crossing the divide between symbol and actual. In some ways, I write because I can’t not write and because bridging this gap—understanding and being understood—seems to me like the most important work we can do.”

      →