Still all is tidal: an influx of cash,
new fish, how the winter grass
dies and sandflies arise out of
the brown-green marsh. Gulls,
like tourists, wade dully along
a buffet of shoreline. Still tidal:
the wide white wakes of boats
beneath golden cumuli drifting
in an unthreatening sky where
black specks, tern flocks, bank
then wheel as if on an invisible
half-pipe. Coming in, going out:
the parasails filling like poppies,
the fiddlers and their curtain calls.
HASTINGS HENSEL is the author of a full-length poetry volume, Winter Inlet (Unicorn, 2015), which earned the Unicorn Press First Book Award, and of a chapbook, Control Burn (2011), which won of the Iron Horse Literary Review Single-Author Competition. The recipient of the 2014-2015 South Carolina Arts Commission Fellowship in Poetry, his poems appear in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, Cave Wall, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University, where he is the poetry editor of Waccamaw, and lives with his wife, Lee, in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina.