The Waves, Part IX

Ezra Garey Levine

Now the mackerel are watched or watch themselves,wave themselves or are wafted and beheldby that which beholds                                                  war, banked yellow, shelveswarped and molding, books missing eyes, eyes felledin boots and now wooled over. An eye oneither side, one wicks itself up intothe crest                    and catches one dandelionin its gaze, on the bank, and the whole blue,all of it, on its right.                                                  Briefly a man,now the wave breaks, and the scattered sun stillsets the school alight and shattering, sandchurning, all eyes, all breath and green and gill.You, kaleidoscopic, brief as horseflies,bacterial and lithic thousand eyes.

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Ezra Garey Levine is a social worker, chaplain, and editor. Their poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and In Parentheses. They are based in Brooklyn, New York.

Cover of Colorado Review, Fall/Winter 2025

Colorado Review

Fall/Winter 2025

Fort Collins, Colorado

The Center for Literary Publishing
Colorado State University

Director & Editor in Chief
Stephanie G’Schwind

Poetry Editors
Donald Revell
Sasha Steensen
Camille T. Dungy
Matthew Cooperman

Associate Poetry Editor
Felicia Zamora

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Launched in 1956 (with the first issue featuring work by Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Henry Miller, Bertolt Brecht, and Mark van Doren), Colorado Review is a national literary journal featuring contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Each issue is approximately 200 pages. Published three times a year, CR has a circulation of approximately 1,100, is carried by university and public libraries across the country, and is distributed by Kent News to independent bookstores. The journal receives over 9,000 manuscript submissions each academic year.

Colorado Review is committed to the publication of contemporary creative writing. We are equally interested in work by both new and established writers. CR does not publish genre fiction, nor do we subscribe to a particular literary philosophy or school of poetry or fiction.

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