K.C. Wolfe

K.C. Wolfe is the nonfiction editor at Sweet: A Literary Confection, which he co-founded in 2008. His essays and short fiction have been published in Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, The Sun, Joyland, Phoebe, and other publications. He teaches at Eckerd College and lives, on average, in St. Petersburg, FL. These are his first published poems.

Ballast

Close enough to water hereso the breeze carries hints,air flush with brine and bird shit, ghosts of fish, brackish decay—an insinuation of seawater
like a memory of cold—the name of a friend onecan’t find on the tongue—and this desire to forget, for fog to curtain the haunting salt, for mangroves clotting,skulking seaward, beach towels hung to lawn chairs despite certain rain. Today, on the sweet breeze of a warm afternoon, the light so vivid it hurts, a runner rounds third on the outside TV, and we cheeras if he will hear usforever
and ever this fact lingers: of land bared flat, slapped clean by surge, palms gale-stripped, boats piled like limbs in the wharf,gray spell of absence beyond, forever.
Does this make the ballgame better, our voices enduring?I don’t know. Morningsthe shorebirds weep
—then vanish as nearing trailers rumble, towing boats named for lovers.

Cardinal

The one I see daily, blackmasked bolt of crimson,perches on the plastic rim of the driver’s-side mirror—peers, recoils, stiffening that arrogant headpiece, tilting the head in study or supplication,leaning in, furious, pecking.
Reeling and pecking: two birds converge, tapping the surface together, then again departing together.
Or is it more accurate to say he pecks notat himself but hisown glittering reflection?
Maybe it doesn’tmatter. What matters is less the peck than the recoil, the perplexitythat beginsand concludes the act—that flashof bewildering gaze at oneself, staggering back, detaching, head tilted,beak agape, the frissonof déjà vu. Is that me? he asks, staring at himself. Or is that you? Andwhat is this surface we meet always,always pecking?

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