Pratik : PRATIK LA SPECIAL ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: MAURYA SIMON'S POEM, "The Strand"

Monday, February 7, 2022

PRATIK LA SPECIAL ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: MAURYA SIMON'S POEM, "The Strand"

MAURYA SIMON

The Strand

Photo courtesy of Robert Falk

She’s flying. Surf-song beats its tambourine in her ears as she whips her bicycle down the long esplanade. Only the cold sun follows her this wintry evening. Fleetingly, Mélusina glimpses the elegant shadows draping themselves in banners from Dewey’s sea-staring windows. A brown pelican hovers above her, a chaperone. A tall boy waits for her on the pier, his lips red as pomegranates. There’s a rush of blood in her groin, a tautness in her breasts. The air sizzles and her heart practices a strange catechism as her calves pump furiously, the iodine wind drying her slick skin. When she spots him—his black hair and alarming smile—she whispers, Ravish me.

Maurya Simon’s ten volumes of poetry include The Wilderness : New and Selected Poems, recipient of the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Benjamin Franklin Independent Booksellers. Her poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Farsi. Simon’s a Professor of the Graduate Division and Emerita Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains.

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