Weekly Feature: Poetry at The Arts Fuse
Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday
America, What Dream Do You Dream?
The first body is water—
clear, one crushing wave
over another, aqua into blue.
Beach glass shimmers beneath the tide
while microplastics ride through the foam.
The sea remembers everything.
Each year, the storms come earlier.
June begins with thunder
as lightning splits the skies open
giving us too much rain.
And some days it’s hard to go on
with the torrent of bad news
It is hard to remember I am
a body of water
and forgive me for clicking too much
on what I like
instead of putting
my feet in the hard sand,
feeling the broken shells
under my feet
like teeth.
America, what dream do you dream?
How can we lose track
of ourselves on borrowed time?
America, who are you
beneath the shimmer
of flood and blood?
Your silence is starting to sound
like permission.
Water doesn’t lie.
It revises us, muscle
to bone, like a lost language
we must preserve.
The first body is water—
what must be saved
before the tide takes it away.
January Gill O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife, all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road won the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (2012–2018) and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. O’Neil is a recipient of fellowships from the Barbara Deming Fund, Cave Canem, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.
— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx