by Marc Alan Di Martino

Hot roasted corn tastes just like seawater
to parched lips. First it burns, then it heals.
It then dissolves into your consciousness
as something best recalled, more truly lived
the longer, the more intensely it steeps.
After we gnaw each scorched cob to the bone
we pluck the kernels off like pearls. Sand
smarts our gums. A pinkie finger makes
a fine toothpick—built to saw, dislodge
the empty yellow casings, to root out
granule after granule of abrasive dust.
My father tells stories of how we’d peel
silk from our teeth each August, legs exposed,
splayed recklessly beyond our shade’s scant dome
and toss the ratty cobs into the dunes.
Once, a blue crab zigzagged down the surf
before a breaker swiped it from our view,
ferried it away. Too soon, the sun went down.

Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of the collections Love Poem with Pomegranate, Still Life with City and Unburial. His poems and translations appear in Autumn Sky, Gyroscope Review, Pulsebeat and many other journals and anthologies. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024. A reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.