Black Beach Idyll

By James McKee

Late afternoon. Subarctic shoreline.

Sun nowhere to be seen.

Beneath an opaque white sky

rolls an opaque gray sea.

Look: a jumble of purpleorange, buoyant

on the cinder-colored shingle,

enfolds the exuberant PDA

of a bubble-jacketed couple.

They frolic and spoon in a trough of pebbles

that glisten like droplets of tar.

They've noted the portents—birdless silence,

the punishment that passes for weather,

outcrops of washed-up whale vertebrae—

but keep their anguish on standby.

Ambient daylight had warmed up the gravel

as if in welcome, so they,

too long deprived of uncomplicated joy

to pass it up, lapped it up. Entwined

and nuzzling, they drift sweetly for hours

near where a glacier died.

But how? Easy: just as nothing shows

water's splendor like a water-

fall, so their bliss in shared oblivion

crests here, at the brink of the future.

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James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, while his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Spoon River Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Ohio Review, New World Writing, Illuminations, CutBank, Flyway, Xavier Review, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.