by Susan Michele Coronel

The beat goes on & on as you springsystem
us into awareness amid harbor views,

dazzling galleries, bougainvillea arched
over café walls. You’re like a humpback whale

in Hawaiian shirt communicating more than
the bare necessities of life with clicks, whistles,

vocalizations & slapping sounds. Echolocate this,
you troubadour of brotherly love! Your beard

is bread in a tangled vine, your eyes at once
sparkly beach stones, raindrops & holes

in clam shells drilled by mollusks searching for food.
You do not need to search for sustenance. You are

the provider of soul morsels & offer them freely.
After dining at Fresco’s Waterfront Bistro, we hear

a new question pepper the sidewalk by the ice cream shop:
Did you know that you’re beautiful? Saint Pete holds

a Guinness World Record for the most consecutive
days of sunshine. You’re like the Sumerian sun god Utu,

momentarily relieving us of our distress, planting joy
like moss, & for a moment, we acquiesce.

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Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she has had poems published in numerous journals including MOM Egg Review, Spillway 29, Redivider, and One Art. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award.