Out of An Absence of Caution

by Nancy Naomi Carlson

My too-soon-dead ex and I honeymooned
in a rented cottage on Sanibel Island.
We walked the beach that first afternoon,

noting the pink scalloped roof
that would guide us back to our boardwalk.
As the night chilled and the sky turned

dark except for a new crescent moon,
we retraced our steps, but all the hotels
lining the beach looked the same,

their exterior lighting dimmed
to preserve the scenic view.
In hindsight we should have counted

our steps, or timed how far we’d ventured—
just as a decade later, Peter should have
tracked the flutters kicking his heart

before drowning in his own blood—
but I was under the spell of the shells,
and adjusting my breath to the slow

burn of a sunset, though cracks
in the firmament could be seen even then,
as we left the shore to wander the maze

of streets and jacaranda trees,
hungry and tired, but riding a wave
I thought would never let us down.

---

Nancy Naomi Carlson has received two literature translation fellowships from the NEA, and her translations have been finalists for the BTBA and the CLMP Firecracker Awards. She is a poet, translator, essayist, and translation editor for On the Seawall, and has authored twelve titles (eight translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019) was named “New & Noteworthy” by the New York Times, and her translation of Mauritian writer Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude was published by Seagull Books in February 2021. Her co-edited anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press), was also published this year, as well as her translation of Congolese Alain Mabanckou’s As Long As Trees Take Root in the Earth (Seagull). An interview of her as a poet-translator appeared in AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle (February, 2021).