BPR 51 | 2024
Off-Season at the Point
Dawn clouds like ink
sponged with a dirty cloth,
the inky pines in silhouette,
bird cry too cheerful to be borne—
what were the spoils of war
but those in the ocean kingdom?
We lived for canvas sacks
of oysters and clacking black lobsters,
corpses of bemedaled swordfish,
once freelancers of the deep.
Those winter dawns, the sands
were rimed in ice, treacherous, banal,
cordoned off with razor wire.