Gathering Light at a Ferry Stop, Jesolo, Italy by George Yatchisin


Gathering Light at a Ferry Stop, Jesolo, Italy
by George Yatchisin

					after Richard Ross

Damned if it’s dawn or dusk, the sun 
reflecting like a quarter wobbled on 
its arc to heads or tails and who knows 
which means who wins or why. Take

the ferry forth and back, into and out
of your days. Someone has to launder
the sand from the sheets of this resort town 
set on the Adriatic’s Italian armpit.

Or so you think when desiring to be bitter
as Amaro and melodramatic as the opera
you can’t afford. Instead your life rests,
like the medicine they gave you as a child,

melting onto your tongue like sun into sea.
So firmly you were warned not to swallow 
or chew. Just wait, and when it’s all dissolved
you will be well on your way to cured.

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George Yatchisin is the author of Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press 2019). His poems have been published in journals including Antioch Review, Askew, and Zocalo Public Square. He is co-editor of the anthology Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art (Gunpowder Press 2015), and his poetry appears in anthologies including Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman’s Library 2019).

IG: @gyatchisin

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