GALLEONS AT SEA (pt.1) by Alex Nodopaka
WHEN WE FIRST MET THE OCEAN by Heath Joseph Wooten
Each time the water shatters against hydrangea
petals, you stand by, camera thrust
toward the ocean like a gift for the perfect
picture. Sweat gathers your hair into dense ridges
like sand come low tide as you pace the shore
for people-less angles. On the wooden deck,
I run my fingernails
along the salt-softened splinters—like your unshaven
face on a pancake Sunday morning, like your arm
on a closed-curtain Sunday night. Elementary
kids rush along with crab shells white-knuckled
into their hands, leaving smells of seaweed
and milk cartons. Later on the train,
I stretch my legs
and think of your face milky in the seafoam. I didn’t
take a single picture to remember it by. You invite
me to the childish comfort of my head in your lap,
hands lost in my hair. I stay long enough to miss
the first three stations. Instead I watch the sky—
and by that I really mean I watch
your eyes watch
the cities crash by like waves in the window reflection.
Please allow me these bumpy minutes to love you
as the hydrangeas love the warm rain, to love your
jeans’ grain embroidered upon my cheek. Allow me
to soften into you like an autumn stem rejoining
the dirt and to remain, like petals
in your pictures, vibrant forever.
GALLEONS AT SEA (pt.2) by Alex Nodopaka
BREAK OF DAY by Heath Joseph Wooten
The gazing ball, in the gossamer of a blue
moon, blends the garden into the chromatics
of dawn, the silk of the calla lily in the summoning
of day, the pointillism—jade and compost,
pear cores gone to mush. In this garden, the decay
of night weaves dandelions into the apples
of my cheeks, the decay
of night hisses striations like fingers
through the lake fog, the bantam fog gradients
into the stone thirst of the fountain. Seagulls
flock and fly overhead, airplanes flock
in the séance of morning burnt
ochre and grey. How I paint the turning of violets
as the break of day, how the break of day caramels
the mud into pottery, how the vital
ribbons of roots
know only pastoral patterns.
I accept the din of it—the din of bird calls pierces
the phlox, the deer chew through unopened
day lilies, and on the other side of the looking
glass?
The sun crumbles the fog
like a clot of sand into humidity, and the dandelion
seeds dance hanged in the wind, and the ground
bears the rapture of life and stone. This garden,
the needle and thread and tailor’s hand. To laugh
and sigh like a sunflower bent with seed—the gazing
ball gives me this much. This old jubilation,
this blurring of myself.
Heath Joseph Wooten is a 2020 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets fellow, and he is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University. His poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in Adroit, Dishsoap Quarterly, perhappened, and Lammergeier. Twitter: @edgy2003blond
Alex Nodopaka originated immaculately in Ukraine in 1940. He speaks San Franciscan, Parisian, Kievan & Muscovite. Mumbles in English & Barcelonian & sings in tongues after Vodka. Studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca, Morocco. Presently full time author and visual artist in the USA.