carly wheelehan gelsinger / poem

Youth

There are little dark seeds clustered in lines

cooler I slice open a watermelon

to the hum of a 1970s swamp

there is always a baby sleeping

in my suburb with no landmarks

and it is perpetually summer. 

In them, I am thinner

a life I never lived

sometimes I have memories

for a single drop

that we picked and sucked

that we split on rocks and periwinkle

and cacti that we pressed and coconuts

suckle and thick canes of sugar

Not just nectar, but honey, and honey

the world was full of nectar, then.

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Carly Wheelehan Gelsinger is a poet from the Sierra Nevada Mountains who currently writes from an agricultural region of the San Francisco Bay Area. She recently obtained her MFA at Ashland University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Nimrod International Journal, RHINO Poetry, Sierra Nevada Review, MER Literary, and elsewhere.