“Sonnet for Ocean Isle Beach Labor Day” by JC Alfier

Sonnet for Ocean Isle Beach Labor Day

I.

The morning tide enfolds a lone swimmer
braving the dwindling season.
Few walk the tideline —
pilgrims insistent on a shrine,
the sea’s chronic wind driving birds
and the heads of sea oats shoreward
where an ambler kicks at a tangle of seaweed and driftwood
as if there were something underneath it she needs.
Somewhere in a coastal motel a woman
wakes her best friend’s husband.
At the window, she gazes over the coastline.
The broken hull of a white rowboat
flanks the wrackline, bonelike in the new light,
the iodine tang of seaweed stinging the morning air.

II.

Soon the sun-hungry crowds will come
and pack the shoreline under turgid umbrellas
and makeshift lean-tos, sunning themselves
like Europeans on holiday in the Med,
forcing their minds off winter cities, leafless in December.
Children uncontented to keep to footpaths,
will run towards the shore down the slipface of sand dunes.
On a pier bench, a woman is lulled asleep,
watching through a rotted plank,
the sea rushing below her.
Some of us will linger late at the edge of the sea,
having come here at break of day,
as if there were forgiveness in the tides,
a penance we could offer to the open sea.

JC Alfier

JC Alfier's (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work after the style of Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.

Headshot: JC Alfier

Photo Credit: Staff