Walking Barefoot, August

By GAIL MAZUR

The flats mid-morning.
Fussy little house-hunting hermit crabs.

Razor clams, skate eggs, black mussels.
Sea glass frosted by the tides.

Far out, schooners, racers, sloops—
Serenity of their white white sails.

Day moon, round, faint, almost transparent,
Hovering in the pale blue sky,

In its orbit still so near the sun.

Seven years alone by the bay.

An old friend, a neighbor, stumbling,
Has lost her way on the sands.

There’s always tomorrow.
There’s always something left to lose.

Something here is blowing bubbles.
Something’s forever burrowing.

 

Gail Mazur has published seven collections of poetry. They Can’t Take That Away from Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems was the winner of The Massachusetts Book Prize and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. 2016’s Forbidden City is her most recent collection. Her poems have been widely anthologized, including in several Pushcart Prize anthologies, Best American Poetry, and Robert Pinsky’s Essential Pleasures. A graduate of Smith College, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was, for twenty years, Distinguished Senior Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s graduate program and now teaches in Boston University’s MFA program and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she has served for many years on the Writing Committee.

[Purchase Issue 18 here.]

Walking Barefoot, August

Related Posts

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

cover of "Civilians"

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.

Lizard perched on a piece of wood.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Before learning to walk / and before I’d fallen upon the wet earth / already my heart hummed in three tones. / Even when my steps were still clumsy, / I already held three consciousnesses. // Long before my baptism, / already my three nahuals were running