Lovers in the Off-season
Seaside Heights. Or was it Wildwood again?
Had Tobi and I stayed huddled by our beachside bonfire,
November wind would not have sunk its jaws
through our jackets when we climbed the jetty
where it shouldered back the nightfallen tide.
Today, the new sun exposes what the dark left the tideline.
Seafog, braided with gulls, offers us a briny province
of waterworn light. The surf crests in soft wallows.
Our eyes follow an outbound trawler, its windlass
and bridge cobbled with rust. A breeze lifts gull feathers
from a girl’s hand. They drift toward the tide like ensigns
from a ghost ship, and she laughs. In an open space
of clear sand, she and her father scoop the shapes of their bodies.
On this, our final day, we amble the vacant boardwalk,
consider the regalia of sideshows, wonders and souvenirs.
We love off-season amusements, their boarded-up concessions.
How seawinds shuffle through unpeopled rides.
That a phone still rings in the shack of a fortuneteller.
© JC Alfier
JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Raleigh Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.
The Loch Raven Review 