“Late Summer Palm”
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
The wave, having declared love to a rock
in fervent white, hears only its own
lonesome smack and burrows itself in the sea.
Dripping wet you rise, neither immortal
nor woman, yet under this golden swathe
still more than just a man in his sunga.
You make your way up the promontory,
ask what you’ve missed, and I say nothing.
I cut the peach I brought, give you half.
We watch the sky till it orgasms pink.
Then the dirt trail, night spreading like salve
across our sunburnt backs. We part.
I linger on the checkered boardwalk.
I think of the rock’s cheek, the kiss still fresh.
Niemeyer envisioned the museum
as a white flower blooming on a cliff,
and the public made of it a spaceship,
but we venture into its mouth, winding
tongue of a ramp, until I am left alone
with the metaphor. You head to the exhibit
and I to the tilted windows and their
panorama, polyptych of Guanabara
Bay. At sunset, we’re together again,
predella on glass, our joint reflections
footer to the sea. When we leave, I try
a joke, but you’re already looking
at your phone. It’s too late for the ferry back.
We wait for a taxi, a bridge, an exit.
In the museum’s Chinese loggia
that is Chinese only in name,
the torso of a Roman god cast in Greek marble.
His bosom bears stone fruit, brooch
of a left hand fastening the rolled-up chlamys,
and I think of how often I’ve overcompensated for a lack of love
with genitalia. A penis has been gouged
from his testicles, and I, who am man, feel everything
for he who is god and feels nothing. Call it empathy
for an artist’s vision botched by the fig-leafed scalpel
of Christianity, call it fear of time as the ultimate castrator.
I call it neither. After a hookup, I try not to move,
the weight of my lover’s head on my chest.
I have so much to give and little to offer.
Danilo Marin is a Nicaraguan American poet from Miami. He was a finalist for the Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award at the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA, and the Miami Book Fair’s 2025 Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work also appears or is forthcoming in EPOCH and Michigan Quarterly Review.