Online Exclusive: “Beach Reading” by Issam Zineh

Issam Zineh

Beach Reading

Earlier when you told me green was a hard color to wear,
I thought you said it makes the skin look fallow.

I could barely hear you over the specific music
we came here for: esses and effs of oceansound.

We will want, at some point, after having had our fill

of muscular Danes and Saxon blood
and facts about the blockade runner
that wrecked not too far off the eastern end of the island,

to dance with great abandon.

I will try to write some poems in my usual way.
I will editorialize on the appropriateness of the term spirit
animal, name the animal inside me

fox, opine

on the neighborhood flora,
recall my grandmother who would make us stop

on the side of the road in Northern California
so she could steal from the bright orchards—

the kind of thing that could get us killed now.

We’ve rented a beach house for the week.

Two young boys take turns swinging
a shovel at a sand fortress their father took
hours to build.

Our kids buy Italian ice from the vendor.
They insist on blue raspberry even though the dye
gives them the shits.

I’ve left my glasses at home and can barely make out
the supine bodies around us and who they belong to.

I would be a useless pillager.
You theorize that religion was invented by the near-sighted
of the species as a kind of self-preservation. We have a good laugh.

This light going from white to pink. I say I love you.
You say you believe me. The light from pink to blue.
I think about the man

who beat my mother over a parking spot.
The silence that filled the car when she got back in.
She was missing an earring.

I could see the pier in the mirror as she drove off,
and it was spectacular.

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