by Juliana Gray

Every morning in this vacation rental,
I watch the surfers riding the cold Pacific,
hoping that a plucky shark will eat one.

Don’t they know how small and ridiculous
they look? They paddle out at dawn and float
for hours just offshore, tiny dots

like lice in parted hair, waiting for
a perfect wave that never seems to come.
Sometimes one will catch a breaker and coast

for maybe three or four seconds, then fall.
Are they just inept, the specific men
(almost all of them are men) on this

specific beach? I sip my creamy coffee
and finish my crossword while they bob in the swell,
freezing even in their expensive wetsuits.

How good can it be, those three seconds
skimming the outstretched hand of god? No,
really, I’m asking. How good can it be?

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Juliana Gray's third poetry collection is Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017). Recent poems have appeared in Willow Springs, Allium, storySouth, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.

bu Juliana Gray

Feeling sorry for myself,

I blew five bucks

on grocery store tulips,

pink as organ meats.

Outside, April sleeted down,

sealing the earth. A treat.

My good cleaver trimmed

the stems; an aspirin wafer dissolved

at the bottom of a blue vase.

If I’d stopped thinking,

I could’ve had what I wanted:

innocent prettiness.

But Google confirmed my pangs,

described the suffering

of cats who nibbled toxic leaves

or petals. Metaphor,

again. It always ends this way:

prowlers on the ground

and some verdant god enshrined

on a high shelf, unreachable.

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Juliana Gray is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals, and her humor writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.