Amelia Island Surf Club
Forrest Rapier
If this was another overwrought Self-Portrait
as Beach Litter, you would see me carelessly
unraveling, wayward as a cigarette
wrapper in the butterscotch seabreeze.
Crash-soup clomps teal wavelengths—choppy.
People say never surf alone,
but I’m tired of catching sloppy
dropdowns with my goofball dustheads
who howl like Jean-Michel Basquiat
tweaking cocaine-spraypaint
against black tar canvas blanks—primal
forms untangle on crack-brick wallfronts.
Centenarian Oaks drool splotch moss, swayghost
chigger-abodes, the gnat beards, doze above
gnarled gothic-pink camellia bush rambles.
Estuary sanctuary, shield
for the mainland, shrimp-bred stork-home
where I cut my honey-bone,
barrier island habitat strip of spit,
shredded dunes and ditch coquina, coast
guardian—we feel your pulse everywhere.
In the pelican dragline skimming breakers,
in every osprey divebomb for trigger fish,
in the razor wire and sandbags, every Navy
blackhawk navigating above the Saint John’s.
As surflines peak, our brains and tendons ebb
in Atlantic highs where no one can touch us; one
huge, green rush, then empty flights to peace tides.
Forrest Rapier has poetry forthcoming in Dead Mule, Levee, Whiskey Tit, and West Trade Review. He has received fellowships from BOAAT, Looking Glass Falls, Sewanee Writers Conference, and has also held writing residencies at the University of Virginia and Brevard College. Former poetry editor for Greensboro Review and North Carolina Writers Network, he recently received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he now lives and hikes the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains.