Cove

wave into wave unrushed beats
into the cove a shuffle of rhythm through

the open after nightfall
window there is nothing more
primal sounding than the each of each of

these a surged white noise
a present tense present for as long as unfurling over sand over

sand a turbulence stretching
the now that is now
but nothing only else the hush of

hush receding
into unfathomable dark and
deepening and I

was once a boy in this house by this sea in
this bed with this

same now of rhythm and that was long ago but
now the only same

Ides

Whoever claimed it took the stage like a beast and exited cuddly and benign was mistaken. March lingers like a chickenpox in the spinal nerve roots, biding an excruciation in shingles. We could use a doormat for our liminal spaces. It’s five days until April, and across the park I spot a coatless woman screaming invectives off the ornate city hall façade. Is she in agony, or psychosis, or pivoting in between? Body and Soul; Snakes and Ladders; step up, slide down. The mercury bumps against thirty-two, refuses to clamber farther. The tangle of hedge along the property line has been ugly for fifty weeks straight; soon it should erupt in a Sousa-like fanfare of forsythia yellow. But not yet. Do not get stuck on the Ides. Always check the key signature before you launch into song. I heard spring peepers a few nights back, and they lifted my heart, truly. The antifreeze in their blood preserves them through a season entombed in frozen pondside muck. If we drank antifreeze, we would be knocked into kidney failure, sweet as it might taste going down. Last night, in my wakeful hour, I could hear utility trucks performing vague and blocky tasks outside the window. Then second sleep, and suction-cupped tentacles thicker than telephone poles drew me deep through fathoms of exponential pressure, into a hook-beaked deity awaiting unseen; gloom dissolving to a single gray pane of daylight. O my Stars and Stripes whenever.

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems and essays have appeared in Post Road, Pangyrus, Salamander, The Sun, and Tahoma Literary Review. Robbie was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry Prize, and he was a 2019 Robert Taylor fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop. Robbie is the poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont. More at robbiegamble.com.