SARGASSUM

by Mark McKain

“Yellowtails and Turtles in Sargassum” by Michelle Nicole Lowe

This morning folds of orange light, the garden under construction. 
A heat wave threatens. The Gulf Stream slowing.
 
Dislocated matts float into the Caribbean. Home to fish, turtles, 
childhood memories. Sexual identity, nutrient availability,
 
dust from Africa. Wanted: herbivories to graze algae from the reef 
able to scrape the toughest deposits. It won’t recover
 
without your teeth. Seaweed swirls, coquina clams burrow. Shush 
of white noise only birds can penetrate. Water sings to the child,
 
running to the shelter of mother’s knee, a soft tree. Wake up worrying 
I will have to flee—censorship-antisemitism-misogyny-racism
 
feet high washing ashore. A teacher works overtime to erase “take a knee.” 
Her job eliminated if she didn’t ban empathy.
 
Rows of brown-green rafts on the shore, covering turtle nests, 
choking air passages with sulfur fumes—how I often feel,
 
out of place, like Braithwaite in New York, yearning for the “blue mist 
from the ocean” the cotton tree in the school yard,

the crack of sugarcane. The houses flood the trees aflame the bed shaking 
like a theme-park ride throws me into the street.
 
On the curb with cracked cup. And you, sea, gulping water and sky.
The house groans, swims.  

Mark McKain’s work has appeared in Agni, The New Republic, The Journal, Subtropics, Cimarron Review, Superstition Review, ISLE, and elsewhere. He has published two chapbooks: Blue Sun by Aldrich Press and Ranging the Moon by Pudding House Publications. He writes, teaches, and experiences global warming in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

SMALL THINGS

a factual account

by Shira Dentz

Brazilian geologists have found rocks comprised of plastic on an uninhabited island in the mid-Atlantic. —Plastic Soup Foundation, March 22, 2023

microplastics melt and cohabit 
stones on remote islands, 
melding new geology,
fashionably hybrid.
in short time the moon
will have its own time zone,
a part on our watch, as
seaweed blooms mid-ocean
wider than a continent
and lists towards shores,
still-hungry 

Shira Dentz is the author of five books including Sisyphusina (PANK Books); winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize 2021), and two chapbooks including Flounders (Essay Press). Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Pleiades, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetrysociety.org, and NPR, and she’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets Prize and Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Awards.