‘Sanibel’, ‘For All the Waves’ & ‘I May Never Go Back to Chicago’
Allen Forrest is a painter and cartoonist, winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine, his Bel Red landscape paintings are in the Bellevue College Foundation's art collection. He lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Sanibel
I am still here and I miss you
only a soft wind tonight
low tide
the water a window
I can see the shells I want
beneath the water
perfect
and imperfect
on the sandbar the hermit crabs
promenade
past the strangeness
of sea cucumber
a white shore bird plucks its dinner
from the gentle surf
I give space
we seem comfortable
together
schools of tiny fish scatter and reassemble
around my feet
I want
I don’t want
Sanibel, you are still
here
and I miss you
both sea and sky are lavender and light
blue as the sun buttons
them together
For All the Waves
Every day I throw myself against the shore, against the seawall,
against surfboards and ankles and jellyfish
and battleships,
over and over again.
You could say relentlessly.
Every day I withdraw
away from the shore, away from the seawall,
away from surfboards, ankles, jellyfish,
battleships.
Again and again.
Constantly withdrawing.
And I wonder if it’s the way for everyone,
waves upon this ocean opaque
Every dawn I wish for an octopus or
I wish I was an octopus or
I wish I was an octopus with another octopus
together transforming ourselves into the shapes of our containers,
unscrewing lids from the inside, outside
shifting tentacle to tentacle into endless texture.
Every dawn I wish I was a mysticete,
humongously alone in vastness,
not knowing it was vastness.
so opaque this ocean myopic
Every night I sing to the moon that moves me,
sing to the moon that numbs me,
sing to the reflection of the moon on an empty ocean.
Every night I’m silent as a seashell,
silent as driftwood, silent as anemone, silent as starfish,
as seaweed, as sand, as starlight,
silent as foghorn
and I wonder if it’s the way
I May Never Go Back to Chicago
They’ve punctured me.
It’s stage 4.
Don’t call.
After he texted me
I looked outside the hotel window
at the stairs and ladders and HVAC units
on the roofs of buildings,
at the fluorescent ceiling lights
in towers beyond,
the neon blue window of a bar,
pomegranate colored awnings over
cafe-table people watching traffic,
a taxi turning,
a crane.
This city’s where I first met my brother,
where I first learned of him,
in a Hyde Park apartment,
only a fragmented collage
of fire escape and back alley
in my memory, if that is my memory.
I can’t remember a time before him.
We moved away soon after he was born
and I never came back
until now,
a road trip vacation
with husband and children.
It’s Friday, we go home on Sunday.
I’ll come to you, I write,
thinking about the absurdity of logistics, of where I am—
in Chicago, finding out my brother’s dying.
We’d done the tourist things,
seen the miniatures and the skyscrapers,
been given end-of-day donuts
by a waiter at a small-plate Italian place.
I’d dealt with minor sibling squabbles,
left them piled up on a bench in Modern Art
while I stared at Matisse’s Apples, 1916–
trying to learn the secret to still life.
On Saturday we’ll walk to Navy Pier.
I’ll see a man with two small boys,
a man who looks like him.
My brother would like it here.
He’d be up on the Centennial Wheel—
not this wheel that keeps bringing me back
to where we started.
I have a picture of low thick clouds
over Lake Michigan. You could turn
the photo upside down and it wouldn’t matter:
whitecaps or clouds.
Kim Rossi is a poet and speech language pathologist living in Decatur, Georgia. Her poems have been published in isotrope. When she is not working and playing with language, she can be found wandering streets and forest trails.
