Summer Remains a Poem I Can't Write

Low tide I wander
Paine-Hollow Cove over
& again
to see the dolphin
carcass nestling
weeks now in the hummock grass
has eyes eaten
out by shore birds.

Its ribcage exposed
bones white like milkweed.
How the humidity keeps us
in its grief.

Gnats eddy
How my hair coils.

Shoal as a verb means to make shallow
but an inlet
at any tide is a poem
of fullness unwritten
sun-bleached beach plums
cattail spikes

& the toxic salve of the butterfly weed.
Diamondback terrapin
box turtles make a home
here too—for a time—I
read so in The Gazette
& how they stretch their heads
up from under the seawater
mudflat when it rains to drink.

I am only a stretching August
shape—there is no word for this
although pages are places
we make shadows.

All of us
only visitors.
My body under the sun
makes a tall mute slant / passes
across small mounds
of mollusks & rotting
red algae-tangles
in the sandbar.

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Bonnie Jill Emanuel's poems appear in American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Ruminate, Laurel Review, Love's Executive Order, Chiron Review, Midwest Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York where she received the 2020 Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the 2017 Stark Poetry Prize in memory of Raymond Patterson. Bonnie is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a poetry reader for Bellevue Literary Review.