East coast – Kylan Rice

When I said no matter

how pale the lavender, or opal

the gulf; no matter how many hours

a greyhound takes; how exquisite

the distance, the overpass, the corporate beige

—did it have weight? Dear

Denise: I can’t remember,

which of us was the first to write

the other into a poem?

Which of us to figure in the lower left

of a Harmony in Blue and Silver:

Trouville, 1865? Both a near-abstraction

and a tribute at once. Yet for all that

here we are, still never further,

adding a little rose, ambiguous

which way the gaze. Diagonally,

across the sand?

straight out to sea?

Kylan Rice has poetry, prose, and book reviews published in the Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere.