Jan and Dean

You guys’ve just gotta ride
And ride, bristles in the hairlines
Beef-boy jackets snapped, flapping

Twinned on motorbikes or maybe in tandem
Inside some other cream-coloured machine
White-lipped fins climbing bends

Limning out coastline, big surf,
Keyed west from around down south then
Sweating out of tropics and straight on through

Humid into driest dust-gorge
Then corkscrewing back into cool
Some kind of chill we can see in the wetsuits

Overdriven slick years later
Through mid-80s sludge
Pacific Coast Highway

— listen to Carl Watts read Jan and Dean

Carl Watts holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University and currently teaches at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He has published two poetry chapbooks, Reissue (Frog Hollow, 2016) and Originals (Anstruther, 2020), as well as a short monograph, Oblique Identity: Form and Whiteness in Recent Canadian Poetry (Frog Hollow, 2019).