Deceitful Sea

Duplicity is all You know. Hiding
behind Your thin-lipped
waves
when
You’re low.

Then, You recede and Swell Your Manic Careening Beasts,
Slamming the shore,
Your Sea Wall Foaming at the Mouth, Splitting the cottages on Stilts.
We call This Your
High. You have no Control
except to repeat Your Cycles, Your
High Crimes,
Your Hysterics.

ξ

Jane Lunin Perel is a Professor Emerita at Providence College from which she holds an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts. After completing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1971, Perel began a four-decade teaching career in English, Holocaust Studies, and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program, of which she was the founding director, and she directed the Providence College Poetry and Fiction Series. Her work has been internationally published and anthologized, including four collections in verse and her most recent collection of prose poems, Red Radio Heart. Perel is working on her New & Selected Poems.