Alicia Hoffman

Back 
		
		to the train car
outside long island, 

		where everything is
old stone mansion &

		play-ground – later, 
the curve of yours, 

		the way it will linger
near the shadow 

		& flicker off the tree 
purchased from a boy-scout 

		store parking lot, frozen 
in the winter air, dried 

		leaves icing over, melting
out only days after 

		the thaw, the branches 
weighed down &

		overturned, credit 
cards established or

		denied, the slow turn
of thirty, forty . . . we carry

		this life's present: the years
turn backward: always 

		a train car passing
long island, wanting 

		what is outside, wishing 
for whatever it was back.


Gulf Islands National Seashore

This is where I leave, 
where Fort Pickens turns 

alabaster, long drives 
towards New Orleans 

become smoke and 
mirror memories 

of the Rue de Canal 
trolley ride towards 

the center of somewhere 
we could get drunk 

on mint juleps in a square 
flowering with bougainvillea – 

long after the taste 
of sorrow fades (what would have been 

better - a beignet, crawfish
thick with roux, a semblance 

of something other?) – Don't 
make the same mistake I did – 

We are definitely 
past Fort Pickens 

when the road turns 
alabaster and there is a toll 

and no one around so
I say screw the change 

until you are convinced 
you can keep on, go

until the ground 
is not ground 

but white sand and 
the hush of distant shore. 

Yes – we are somewhere 
between Mississippi

and Florida when 
the Gulf Coast swallows 

the night sky, so dark 
we carry a flashlight 

to the nearest rush 
of water only to find 

it is littered 
with sea crabs, comic 

in their sideways scurry, 
the translucence 

of shrimp, weird 
lobsters wagging crustacean 

tails and I would say 
be careful, they are arsenic, 

but you would not 
get the joke, and 

this is when I know 
I will stay here, where 

North American shore 
meets the Gulf of Mexico 

I awake from a tent 
and find camp 

is an island of 
sand and brush – 

spikes and burrs 
can stick to my socks

and blue Gulf 
can rise and fall 

against the shift 
and sway and beyond 

the ragged shoreline 
I linger to swim 

and dive and you 
are not coming along. 








Alicia Hoffman holds an MA in Poetry from the State University of New York at 

Brockport and currently teaches English Literature at Bishop Kearney High School. Her 

poems have appeared in journals such as Redactions: Poetry and Poetics , Red 

Wheelbarrow, and Remark, as well as the online journals Poetry MidWest, The Flask 

Review, Whimperbang, Flutter Poetry Journal and Poets Against The War.