The Beach Bum and the Midwestern Freshman
by Zebulon Huset
January 2021
From the start
it was a gingerbread house.
Or a sand castle
just before the tide.
We refused to leave
despite warnings
like Missouri rednecks
on the Mississippi.
Everyone knew the inevitable.
A slow erosion
of the base,
grains slipping away
with each swish of water
and before the ebb
we were always expecting,
crumble.
Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer, and photographer living in San Diego. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest, and his writing has appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Atlanta Review, and Texas Review, among others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.