3 Poems by Joshua Garcia
Crystal Cove National Park, California
The pregnant black rock humps over in the sand
like something mammal, like a washed up body
stacked over itself as if it fell to its knees in prayer
and just kept on falling. Beast-like, refuse, yet
somehow transcendent, the way rough stones,
when stacked with intention, beget meaning.
Water threads into the carapace each night, bloating
with the million little crescendos of rush hour traffic.
Mussels make beds in its shoulders and barnacles
pock the skin, displaying their tight-lipped sex
in a boastful wink at their capacity for self pleasure.
I climb up the rock’s back, and a tide pool anemone
catches my big toe as I lift myself to watch a surfer’s
patience oiling across the water.
My mother wakes me, half stuck
in the sand like the indigo shells emptied
and brushed thin, to tell me my sister-in-law
has called with news that the dance
of weft and warp has begun inside her. I turn
onto my back, and my stomach slopes
earthward. Sand crumbles from my ribs.
Bone yawns like a cave waiting
to receive the tide.
Crossing
The hawk sleeps, and I nearly sleep, too,
except that I lay in wait, listening for your wanderings.
I smolder in the moonlight like the red hills
and count my ribs in search of your stockpiles.
My tongue plumbs the clay for gutted rivers and spits
a salve back into the earth.
A path forms to a clearing wild with regrowth.
What bright noise our bodies will make there.
A chorus. A garden.
The air tastes of blood and eucalyptus.
And I am not afraid.
Upon Seeing a Glimpse of Your Thigh One Evening
I am reminded of the sandbar at Sullivan’s
Island on the last truly warm day of the year—
how it broke the surface like a leg rising.
It was there just long enough
for me to press my ear to the wet sand
and listen, not to superficial things,
the water lapping inward or the singsong
of those tanning once more before winter. But below,
for the magmatic rush found in a conch shell,
the pulse of the most unseen place.
I could have laid there forever, my body
browning into the sand until together
we would recede. But the time came to wade
toward shore, and it was gone
before I had the chance to look back.
Joshua Garcia lives and writes in Charleston, SC. This fall, he will begin pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry at the College of Charleston. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nashville Review and Ekstasis Magazine.