From the pier, we watch two gulls wander
overhead, the day oddly warm.
The sun has waxed the city
into speechlessness. Suspicious
of the island across the Bay,
you ask if prisoners really swam from there.
The reason, we’ll learn, is obvious:
the best bars are in the city.
We sit and stare for a while, and you,
not nervous for once, take my hand.
We walk around the aquarium
where you pay just to watch me
giggle at the otters curled
like pieces of saltwater taffy.
We eat steak, drink Malbec, and at night,
at the bar, we become as we are meant:
two gulls, wandering, from the pier.
Christian Paulisich received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. In 2023, he received the Julie Sophia Paegle Memorial Poetry Prize from The Concrete Desert Review. His work has been published or is forthcoming from Blue Marble Review, New York Quarterly, Pangyrus, Rust + Moth, The Ocotillo Review, I-70 Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Invisible City, and others. He is a poetry reader for The Hopkins Review.