A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

From Jupiter

Forrest Rapier, USA

 

Off Florida's East coast, two shirtless boys 

thump barefoot down a dock with bait

buckets & a hundred dollars worth of gas.

 

      Whitewater hit the slip—Perry

gunned after a school of Mahi Mahi

Austin spotted on his fish radar.

 

Nobody on the pier looked twice 

when they hauled-off into a storm

      the Coast Guard dubbed ‘typical

 

South Florida’—heavy rain, thunder. 

Nine days after they left Jupiter,

      the Coast Guard found a boat 

 

      capsized eighty miles offshore

—one orange jacket tethered to a lifeline.

No one can predict a rogue wave.

 

      Perry’s mother said, 

“These children are surrounded by water 

from the moment they’re born.”

 

Did they bob near the wreckage?

Survive the first night’s storm, float 

      in inky infinity like corks on a wine sea? 

 

Five thousand miles across the world, 

Hawaiian flower pistils pink 

      alight Kilauea cooled magma.

 

A flare shot from a shuteye 

ocean—we hope you see us.

      We’re right here.



  

Forrest Rapier is a recent MFA graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has appeared in Best New Poets, Texas Poetry Review, Verse Daily, The Greensboro Review, among others. He is currently a lecturer in the English Department at UNCG.

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