They Built a Wall Around the Ocean
A poem by Fall 2006 Featured Poet Lily Bower
They built a wall around the ocean,
as if it is not the sea, but the American Embassy
instead.
I run my hand along it as we walk
and I can hear the ocean
and I can smell it.
I can smell it even when we are back in the city
because it has pushed itself into my hair and skin.
It is on everyone around me too,
rubbed down into their pores and wrinkles so that they
taste it on every breath the way I do.
The fog here is also the sky,
it's also the sea and the houses,
built out of clouds like drywall,
so that the ocean never needed to be hidden behind
concrete.
Children already grew up believing in a ceiling above
their city
and an invisible sea.
Invisible whales and pirates and ocean liners that no
one will ever
get to see.
The embassy is silent every morning when I pass,
and the baking bread and gasoline that brush against
it will never get
inside,
because it doesn't have skin or hair to hold on to.
The fog is so tight that you can't see the cut and
bleeding hills
and the houses that rise up behind it,
not even from the very top floor.
You can't see the waiting people curled like roots
around its base,
or Lima's dirt floors spread out in front of it like a
refugee camp.
Fall 2006 Poetry:
READING HOPKINS IN PALOS VERDES
by Andrew Demcak
REFLECTIONS ON WRITING by Jann
Burner
THEY BUILT A WALL AROUND THE OCEAN
by Lily Bower
VISITING CAVE CREEK by Nicholas
Messenger
PUBLISHER'S NOTE and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
by Benjamin Bucholz
THERE IT IS by Hannah Price
GEOMETRY AND A LETTER by Laura
McKee
SENEGALESE GROVE by Holly Day
AFRICA by Kathryn Wagner
DEFINITION OF A TREE by Christine
Hamm
AFTER MY NAME IS SPOKEN by Meridith
Gresher
SHAPES IN THE AIR by Carolyn
Syrgley-Moore
NEITHER FISSION NOR FUSION by Ed
Tato
CLEAVINGS by Hank Kalet
A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS by KC Wilder
WHAT YOU WOULD CALL A LOOSE GHAZAL, I
REGARD AS
ANOTHER SMALL, BUT NECESSARY, STEP TOWARD RECOVERY by James
R. Whitley
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