The First Time I Saw the Sea by Jenna Le
The First Time I Saw the Sea
Jenna LeThe first boy that I dated weighted down his coif
with so much hair gel that the crest atop his pate
was hard as horses’ teeth. But the first man I loved
had curls so soft and yielding, sea-wind seemed to sit
nestled at all times in their depths.I asked him, once, to drive me to a beach. I hoped
to see hot conch-strewn sand unfurl before my vision
like a bronze sarong warmed by the body it once draped.
But the beach he drove me to was stone-gray and snow-ribboned,
its seashells sparse and small as grapes.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in The Margins, 2015.
ABOUT JENNA LE
Jenna Le is the author of the collections Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She has been a winner of the Poetry By The Sea sonnet competition and sonnet crown competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. She works as… (more)
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