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POETRY BY BETH GYLYS
THE PILGRIMAGE
We make our way to the
park, the end
of Lincoln Ave, this patch of well-coifed grass:
me, the couple in khakis, their hands buried
in each other's back pockets,
the man on a bicycle, some teens
shivering in T-shirts, a brown lab
snuffling at the end of his leash.
Below us the bay: shifting, impatient;
the boathouse with its sailboats leaning
elegantly to one side. Meanwhile,
the sun's peach eye sinks quickly
toward the bay's-edge. A man
holding a blue coffee cup stands to my left.
A woman huffs to the curb
pushing a baby carriage. We are silent,
shifting foot to foot. White smudged lines
of airplanes crisscross above the sun,
whose bottom has melted now
into the water's lap. A green Porsche
slowly cruises past. A bird hovers above us
then dives, and the sun's a pale half
dollar in a yowl of plum and scarlet.
How the sky seems to reel,
that heft of fire descending, now copper,
now chartreuse, now a darkened
smear of gold, and we're dumb, straining,
lingering to the end, when we will turn
back into strangers, but now, transfixed,
we are one eye burning with glory.
Beth Gylys is an Assistant Professor
of English and Creative Writing at
Georgia State University. Her collection Bodies that Hum
won the Gerald
Cable First Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press
in 1999.
She has had poems published in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, New
Republic,
Antioch Review, Southern Review and other journals.
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Interesting Monsters
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Rosicrucian in the Basement
by Robert Sward
Bloodroot, the book and Bloodroot, the excerpt
by Aaron Roy Even
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