Forrest Rapier, USA
Off Florida's East coast, two shirtless boys
thump barefoot down a dock with bait
buckets & a hundred dollars worth of gas.
Whitewater hit the slip—Perry
gunned after a school of Mahi Mahi
Austin spotted on his fish radar.
Nobody on the pier looked twice
when they hauled-off into a storm
the Coast Guard dubbed ‘typical
South Florida’—heavy rain, thunder.
Nine days after they left Jupiter,
the Coast Guard found a boat
capsized eighty miles offshore
—one orange jacket tethered to a lifeline.
No one can predict a rogue wave.
Perry’s mother said,
“These children are surrounded by water
from the moment they’re born.”
Did they bob near the wreckage?
Survive the first night’s storm, float
in inky infinity like corks on a wine sea?
Five thousand miles across the world,
Hawaiian flower pistils pink
alight Kilauea cooled magma.
A flare shot from a shuteye
ocean—we hope you see us.
We’re right here.
Forrest Rapier is a recent MFA graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has appeared in Best New Poets, Texas Poetry Review, Verse Daily, The Greensboro Review, among others. He is currently a lecturer in the English Department at UNCG.