Tide Pool
        The old oceans return us, slowly tug us,
        along the familiar fiction of childhood.
        —NORMAN DUBIE, "Popham of the New Song"

I'm dating my 16-year-old
self again. I'm a romantic dog. Woody
Allen is a hero & Portnoy a god
but I've yet to rub Buddha's fat
vegan belly. In my free time
I still think my time is free. I ditch
my public education staring at the holes
in the asbestos ceiling tile & read
Plato at Jetty because I've been told
he was serious & I want to be serious
even though I can't stop punctuating
every sentence with "dude." Most
Californian sea life is dull-brown or gray
except for sea anemone, which are blue
or red. The jetty smells of sea lions
& fishermen but I've never seen
a sea lion or fishermen there, only
a baby great white once after a storm,
jaw opened on the wet rock, too small
to fit around my knee, its incisors
kind of cute. My life's already been
punctuated by death & ecstasy,
cranial needles & feral dogs
chasing us mezcal-eyed on horseback
through Ensenada' s barrio muerte
so I think that qualifies me to be a poet
even though I'm not really sure
what a poet does. "But," Katie says,
"you can't be special in this city
unless you're a movie star & why
would you want to do that?" I've
shown her my spot on the rocks
at Sunset & PCH & shown her
my wave doodles in the foreword
of Plato because I can't focus
long enough to make it through
the first page. "Look," I say & poke
the mouth of a red anemone
so it wraps its sticky around
my poke & shudders as though
it were midnight & my finger
was a grunion come ashore to mate
& I am now a piece of moonlight
caught flopping back to join the rest
of the ocean's moonlight. Katie
is from a family that uses words
like "proper"—her parents say
I got an artist for a dad. Red
crabs shadow in the rocks
& move their turret eyes
every time we touch hands.
"You're so obvious," she says.

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Copyright © 2019 Noah Blaustein All rights reserved
from After Party
University of New Mexico Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission