TANA JEAN WELCH, "BOSTON UNDERWATER BY 2100" (Issue 18)

BOSTON UNDERWATER BY 2100

The first time

we rode our bikes
            through the Boston Harbor Hotel’s arch,
                           a big band on the floating stage played
                                      a romantic swing burdened by trombones
 

and even though everything went to the rent,
the grandiosity of the hotel, the rotunda, the yachts in their slips
 

was our grandiosity—
 

                                      we were easily drinking
              champagne while discussing
              Dean Martin’s Ten Thousand Bedrooms
 

because our belief
                                        in love was earnest and all
 

we needed—
 

but now the stage is sinking
with the rest
of our created history:
 

wistful walks past Alexander Hamilton on Comm Ave,
            lavender lemonades in Copley Square,
                             the Union Oyster House, our initials carved in stall 19.
 

           

            Once the rain,
its tiny pressure on your scalp, like ants
                             passing the door of a tobacconist.
 

Now the superstorm, the surging tides.

Now you and I,
            the satiated bedroom guests we never were,
            (alongside the rest of the humans) wanting
                             more and more from the collapsing ground—
 

Now Faneuil Hall and every corner
where we met and kissed, where a thousand others met,
             conspired, or exchanged—
 

             each body believing
                             their plot point the most paramount,
                                        each forgetting history and story emerged
 

             from the same word:
istorie—
 

                                                        Now and always forgetting
                              we build our cities to house myths,
                              our histories to house cities—
 

             Soon the sea
will claim this reclaimed land,
             sending these few fragments forever
 

to the drink. Leaving the cities, leaving
             our love
                               

                        

                                                    to become something else.



ABOUT THE POET

Tana Jean Welch is the author of Latest Volcano, winner of the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Southern Review, The Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and other national literary journals. Born and raised in Fresno, CA, she currently lives in Tallahassee where she is assistant professor of Medical Humanities at the Florida State University College of Medicine. TanaJeanWelch.com

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