Amalgam

John A. Nieves

The beach and the balustrade, we are one. Place
the playset outside your window onto the avenue
outside mine and watch the cars try to find space
to slip by creaking swings, the tree bare in the winter blue

of the day-sky. Or find me here, ponies near
the steeplechase, the food- carts, the briny wash
that chills our feet forward. Or we are here
in the carved-spoon room off the sun -striped porch

that is also by a lake and by the sound. Even in small
water, there are whales who know the secrets of depths
we will never swim, currents we will only taste as dream salt
and waking. The scrub brush and hard sand wreath

the pebble shore, the places our bare soles have learned
as texture before name. Turning away is easy, but we’ve turned

toward this hallucinogenic terrain where my highrises
and your chickens grow on the same ground, where
the pigeons and lizards take from the same prizes:
plums and popcorn and something sidewalk-sweet there

stereoscoping with wildflowers and wrought iron. Take
in deep the open air and the tidal air and the city’s hot breath:
one planet’s kiss we share against the kind of sunset that’d make
anywhere merging magic. We carry those colors beneath

our skin, in each other’s blood. We can see the river but we are
not in the river. Touch    the seawind, the ships it has moved and where
they’ve moved to. Everything slinks toward its own horizon-star
but we are never far. This landscape is only ours, weaving parts

of us together. In the doorway where, in bright day, face meets face
from the beach to the balustrade: we are one place.

John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, swamp pink, and 32 Poems. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, he also won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry.