Explaining oceans to a blind stranger

for Jen Gresham

This is his first time near coastal waters.
He cannot visualize the waves,
but his ears know they are gently rolling.
His form cannot avoid the spray of saltwater,
but he can feel the soft touch of brine,
count goosebumps like Braille,
embrace the calm chill of seabreeze.

My feline form brushes against his legs
and I explain how a beam of moonlight
dances slowly and streaks the ocean
like spilt milk. He nods and my purr
echoes the ocean trumpeting its tropical solo
against pinches of still-warm sand.
I leave to bat at crabs with my paws,
but he stays all night, his breath
toying with the seasmoke that rises and rises.

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Jeff Calhoun is currently pursuing a Ph.D.in biomedical science at the University of Michigan.His writing credits include iota, Mimesis, Eclectica, Stirring, The Broken Plate, and Mannequin Envy. He is the author of three electronic poetry chapbooks, the most recent from recycled karma press, Last Visions at the End of Days. When he is not farming bacteria for plasmid DNA, he can be found skipping mental stones or eating banana pancakes.

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Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows  both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows  including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work  is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art,  New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings,  drawings and collages have been published in many on line  and print magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholia’s Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, Foliate Oak, Siren, Prose Toad, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, The DMQ  Review,  Broadsided, Hotmetalpress, Double Dare Press, Events Quarterly, Unlikely Stories, Coupremine, Cerebration,Chick, Flicks, Softblow,  Eclectica Magazine, Backwards City  Review, Right Hand Pointing, Ascent Aspirations Magazine,  Brew City  Magazine, Fiction Attic, Mastodon Dentist,  Blue Print Review, Ellipsis,The Indelible Kitchen, Cricket,  Entelechy, So To Speak, Taj Mahal Review, The Fifteen Project, The Externalist, Why Vandalism, Mungbeing Magazine,  Lamination Colony, Paradigm, Lily, Literary Fever, Glassfire Magaine,The Houston Literary Review, Lilies and Cannonballs,  Wheelhouse Magazine, Terra Incognita, Qarrtsiluni, The Tusculum Review, Multidementional, 34th Parallel, Wood Coin, Sacramento Poetry, Art & Music, Anti-Poetry, Divine Dirt Quarterly, The Mom Egg & Disenthralled. Over the years he has received  three National Endowments For The Arts Fellowship, two  Pollock-Krasner grants and most recently in 2004 received  The Adolph Gottlieb  Foundation grant. Currently he teaches  art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in  Brooklyn.

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Kathy Roth is an artist who is inspired by bright  colors,  nature, and a love of the tropics.  Her colored pencil drawings have been used in local exhibits for students. Recent publication credits include Soundzine and Ken*Again. Kathy says, “I have experimented with charcoal, pastels, pen and ink, but have found colored pencil drawing to be the area in which I excel.”

Aquanaut

His hair parts at Moses’ command,
two waves swept in symmetry
over and along the dunes of his cheeks.
A gust combs it all to one side, then back again.

His face unfolds its joy;  beach
towel unfurled and tented round
a billow of salted air, before it floats
down to spread open on the sand.

His chest rises in rhythm with the surf.
Coruscating drops flash as he turns
into the face of high-white sun, echo the whitecaps,
the glass and agate seeds sown at the shoreline.

His stride to the sea is as unregenerative
as driftwood, his shoulders rolling
as a dory rocks.  He dives and rises,
his muscled thighs humpbacked as whales.

Gulf of Canada

Venga Aqui—  here, to Florida,
you said, as though miles and careers
and my husband wouldn’t slow us down.

Cheam Mountain oozes its own solar lava
charm, less salty.  Less turquoise
dazzling the waters than Tampa’s.  Quartz-smoke

rivers spill through Fraser Valley,
barely tainted by proximity
to cities, to you.  These waterways,

not big enough to sever longings,
but clean enough to wash me of momentary
lapse into fancy, swift enough to drown

out the latest ring of Auntie’s phone calls
from Gainesville, tempting me to bridge
the gulf, por tu.

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Eve Anthony Hanninen — an American poet in Canada — writes and illustrates from beneath the dripping fronds shading a North Coast, BC, town.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Magnolia: A Florida Journal of Literary and Fine Arts, Long Story Short (interview, 2009), east to west: bicoastal verse, Sein und Werden (print and online), Moondance, Wicked Alice, and other fine poetry journals.  She’s anthologized in Crazed by the Sun and Trim: The Mannequin Envy Anthology. Bookjacket illustrations include Ellaraine Lockie’s Blue Ribbons at the County Fair, and Patrick Carrington’s Hard Blessings.  Eve edits and publishes The Centrifugal Eye poetry journal.

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A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Everglades National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had poetry appear in dozens of publications as well as in many anthologies. She has five books to her credit, including Godwit: Poems of Canada, which received the 2009 Andrew Eiseman Writers Award for Poetry. She was poetry editor of Sea Stories (www.seastories.org), and is now book reviewer and assistant editor for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com) and moderator of the poetry blog, Smothered Air (http://smotheredair.yuku.com/).

She is currently at work on a project with poet William Heyen, photo-illustrating his essay, “The Green Bookcase,” soon to be published by Janus Head. She also teaches at Writers & Books, Rochester, NY. You can read more about her and sample her poems and photographs at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

The Winter Sea

The ocean’s grey today, like someone’s dingy laundry,
the flop and slosh of sudsy waves agitate on the sand,
and the sky’s the inside of an ashtray at some salty dive.
I don’t care.  When I took my morning walk, the blonde
grasses bowed low in the wind but did not break, and I found
a small flash of happiness in the margins, where a scrabble
of bayberry, goldenrod, pearly everlasting and milkweed
clumped together, their dried leaves and seedpods still
hanging on, no matter how hard the wind tried to knock
them down.  Reduced and diminished, they remained
themselves, in spite of the elements.  The way we
keep on walking each morning, as we throw off
the covers of the night, stride out on the boardwalk,
arms swinging.  Yesterday at sunset, the sun’s last
razzle turned the water to liquid aquamarine, jewels
I wanted to scoop up and wear at my wrists and neck.
Earlier, the sea had been true blue, the color I imagine
blood might be, as it runs in my veins with the tide
of the heart.  Anchor me to this world, God of spindrift,
God of spume and salt spray, God of sand.  Too often,
I have let myself listen to the other voices, the ones
like Iceland gulls that shout can’t can’t can’t. Right now,
fishing trawlers hang on the edge of the horizon, straight
as a clothesline, the edge you might fall over.  But which,
the closer you approach, whether by sailboat, dinghy, or skiff,
is never reachable.  Always, there is more.

Strewn

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end
of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane.  But now I’ve landed
on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives two blocks from the ocean,
and I can’t believe my luck, out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.
Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running for the sheer dopey joy of it.
No one’s in the water, but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.
The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting.  Underfoot, strewn, are broken
bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls of whelk, chips of purple
and white wampum, hinges of quahog, fragments of flat grey sand dollars.
Nothing whole, everything broken, washed up here, stranded.
Light pours down, a rinse of lemon on a cold plate
of oysters. All of us, broken, some way or other. All of us
dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

Breath

I’m thinking of it now, as these clouds race by,
gray dolphins outlined in white, the reverse
of a child’s drawing.  I draw in a breath,
think of my mother’s life, thinning itself down
to spindrift and salt spray.  Each day, a struggle
to fill up her lungs. I’m tired of the doctors
and their weather of lies. The sky is full
now, a whole pod of porpoises, and the white
light behind them can no longer be seen.
She lingers over dinner, slow to finish her soup,
broth with tiny rafts of celery and onions, golden
carrot suns.  What small coins should I place
in her purse to pay the ferryman?  How many breaths
do we get in this life?  How many puffs of wind
to push a schooner across the sea?

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Barbara Crooker’s work has appeared in magazines as diverse as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor,  Highlights for Children, and The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA).  She is the recipient of the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.  Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize;  Line Dance, (Word Press 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C & R Press, 2010).