BY JACQUELINE BALDERRAMA

I am following your sandals and swishing skirt again, 
back to the tender boats delivering passengers to the ship. 
Behind us, squat pistachio trees and pumice rock darken 
below the pastel cubes of civilization. 
They occupy a divide between island rim and sky, 
something like paradise making these peach and blue houses cling to the cliffside. 
At sunset we march along the pebbled sidewalks
and take the cable cars toward sea level. 
Then, the view swallows us whole, 
its expanse convincing us that the blue of its waters, 
the same blue swinging from the hips of Giordano’s Perseus
and lightened in its sky, is effortless and everywhere.

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JACQUELINE BALDERRAMA is the author of Now in Color (Perugia Press, 2020) and the chapbook Nectar and Small (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She lives and works in Salt Lake City where she is pursuing her PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Poet Lore, and New Ohio Review, among other journals.