Issue > Poetry

Carl Watts

Carl Watts is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University, Canada. His poetry has been published in The Antigonish Review, CV2, Grain and The Best Canadian Poetry 2014. His debut chapbook, REISSUE, was published in 2016 by Frog Hollow Press. His critical writing has appeared in American Review of Canadian Studies, Canadian Literature, among other magazines and scholarly journals.

The Amity Island

Home the halls of Wolfenstein 3D,
our Gatling guts shuddered into puberty
and when our clothes got old
we took them to the Amity; empty
bodies bed-folded, bagged,
driven somewhere downtown

where once we passed a pile
of pitted garments bloodied, butterflied,
entrails, helmet bobbing alongside,
splayed like dead guards in Castle Wolfenstein

drowned in pungent streetlight orange,
our downy fabrics in opaque plastic,
car a warm DOS vector, Baywatch orange
air-mattress fluttering on the surface
of a seventies city center's cancer.

Later, the sick-soft motor-whirr
of VHS loosened our swim caps,
pinched our pastel mats,
sent sharks uptown
sleek and black from Amity Island.