Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
March, 2020 – poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn.
March, 2020
When the water from an ocean wave stops reaching
towards the shore and is not yet moving back to the sea,
a small stillness, like a door, glistens on the wet sand,
then disappears.
A wooden door with green slats, a brass knob
that won’t turn. I keep sensing
the signs—
the coconut palms as I walk beneath them,
the wind-whip through their fronds
like someone rummaging frantically
through a cluttered drawer.
And the hibiscus blossoms
in red alarm
like bells for forests burning.
Whale Watching
Each time the finback
surfaces this morning—
its lids like labias’ soft folds
around the eyeball’s shiny center
that catches the light for a moment
before the leviathan
dives back down—
I read that the male finback
must find a band of water
at a certain depth
for his lowest notes to be
heard by the female way across the sea.
Like a ring on a finger,
a narrow band that encircles the earth’s oceans *
from which
he beckons
I am here, here.
And she knows precisely how deep
she must swim
to the place where she can
listen, listen.
No human has ever heard the female song,
though I imagine a more mysterious tongue
of pheromone, fluke and fin, tidal pull and moon.
Does she swim across
the ocean
to answer
his calling?
No one
knows.
On Your Thirty-Ninth Birthday
All day I carry the soft ache
of you in my body. At first
I thought, am I getting sick?
Month after month, you don’t
return my calls. I carry the ache
like the heaviness before
labor pains began when you
were born. I carry it
like a furrowed brow
of weatherfront still in the distance.
Because a mother must have hope.
Must have hope.
Must.
© Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at The 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor at-large for Plume Poetry. Her poems appeared in The Dodge, New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, ECHOLOCATION, was on the long list for the Julie Suk Award in 2019.