Emily A Benton

Great Wave

after Katsushika Hokusai

Not a quake nor a storm nor any major event
other than the wind conjures up your woodblock
with its whitecaps against an imperial blue.
Printed more than a hundred Junes ago
on mall kiosk calendars, your art is a souvenir
for what isn’t even there. Imaginary, the critics say.
Scientists use words like laminar or irrotational
but still fail to capture it. Old navigators could
predict one by placing an ear to the cupped palm
of their canoes. But what I really believe is
something else must’ve been burning you
like the contrails behind a man-of-war.
I get that, too, even with my heels in the sand,
watching my beloved dip under shallow breaks.
Somewhere off the contour of this island,
an argument builds against the coral, and
a man like you holds his breath, waiting his turn.
Another way of looking at a mountain.

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Emily A Benton is a poetry editor for storySouth and a former editor for The Greensboro Review and the University of Hawai‘i Press. Her poems have appeared in journals such as ZYZZYVA, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Harpur Palate and Southern Poetry Review. Raised in Tennessee and a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro, she lived and worked in Hawai‘i from 2012 to 2020. She now resides in Georgia. Find more at emilyabenton.com