Poetry by Amy DeBellis

     Monika Murren CC



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Brighton Beach in July


So much sunscreen I’m sweating it off 
and it’s pooling in my collarbone
and still a new freckle blooms every weekend 
and I’m ankle-deep in sand, rooted

to the shoreline, my toes fighting the water 
for the beach. Tide like a bell tolling,
dragging me in, pressing me back. I enjoy 
the instability. You tell me

I look drunk. Later on I change back into real 
clothes in a bathroom stall that won’t latch,
lock wobbling like a loose joint, sand clinging 
to every origami-fold of my body, 

each grain like the grit between my teeth 
when I grind my jaw in sleep. 
My dentist talked about nightguards 
and you showed me a video of masseter 

massages but I think I’d rather grate my jaw 
right down to the bone, crater my teeth 
to shattered nothings. Back in the sun, you buy us 
lemonades. Mine sticks my lips together, trickles 
corn syrup slow and sweet down my shorts, draws 
an unmistakable ceremony of flies.



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Remembering the Countryside During a Harlem Winter 


The end of snow means nothing in a city that’s sinking 
into the sea. A city where you keep glimpsing your long

-dead friend in crosswalks and windows and subway cars, 
false stutter of memory gone rogue, a city where the strawberries 

are either $10 a pound or taste like the kind of water you shouldn’t 
be drinking. Where you can writhe awake all night and never know 

anything like silence. Standing in fake leather boots on garbage
-stained pavement, recall the bug-bitten summers spent 

sunning in grass, blowing ants off wild blackberries, flitting in 
and out through a screen door hinged with rust. Recall the years

spent learning and then forgetting the names of every flower. 
Looking for myself like hunting for ghosts. My past 

a sleeping animal, claws curled, heart cleft 
and narrow as the mouth of a rifle. 

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Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her writing has appeared in various publications including X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, HAD, Write or Die, Fractured, Ghost Parachute, and Pinch. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2025).