Walt Whitman’s Boys
are bathing near the Moonlight Lounge, intermittent replicas, digging troughs with the glorious shovels of their arms. The sea has slept well in the night and allows the intrusions instead of attempting to throw them out as it does when the moon is a pared fingernail, as it does when the moon is the bottom of a glass, as it does when there is no moon and the papaya trees rustle with fruit rats and wind. The water is so warm that their legs dissolve like salt tablets in the mouths of sprinters, one up to the knees, the next to the thighs, though the boys do not miss their limbs any more than the sky misses clouds when they are absent, and if you poured honey on them they would surely, like eels, become electric.
by Jen Karetnick
from Autumn Sky Poetry Number 23, October 2011
Art by Jamie Ferreyros
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