By: Lisa Flynn
At a Reading
A cocktail crowd
competes with the poet’s voice,
and I’m lost
to where words start and end.
I cup my hand shell-shape
behind my ear,
beckon sound closer.
Unlearning how to hear,
I am learning
how to nod
as words unravel
into sounds, roll over
my body. I am learning
how to stop
holding my breath
under cresting waves
of deconstructed language.
I must look so benign…
as if this isn’t a death-grin
as if I don’t know
I just inhaled
the whole damn ocean.
You Walk Away from Your Family
along the shore, low tide-strewn with dried
seaweed, rattle-black skate egg cases, purses
for devil or mermaid, tendrils thrown wild.
You toe a translucent horseshoe crab husk.
The sun spins you giddy. You’re 12 years old
and thirty meters ahead of their slow walking.
You pluck a cabochon of polished sea glass
off the wrack-line, slip it in your shirt pocket,
a doctor or farmer, planting heart or seed.
So far behind, your parents look like distant sails.
You nearly step on a Portuguese Man-O-War,
puffed and gelid, a sand-scalded rainbow, glistening.
Deader than plastic bags your grandmother saves,
rinses, hangs, saves again.
When your sister approaches the corpse,
you think of your grandmother
swimming in a sea-field of jellies, somewhere off England.
Her refugee year, 1939, between housekeeping jobs,
between Germany and here.
You linger, warn your little sister –
even dead, those things can kill you – turn again
down the beach.
If you lose them in your wake,
you’ll meet them in the shadow
of Orleans Light. You’ll always find them, you think
they are always
just behind you.
Lisa Schapiro Flynn has poems published or forthcoming in journals including The Crab Creek Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Noble/Gas Quarterly, UCity Review, Menacing Hedge, 13th Moon: a Feminist Literary Magazine, and others. Her poem received the Honorable Mention in the Crab Creek Review 2018 Poetry Contest, judged by Maggie Smith. She lives in the far suburbs of New York City, with her husband, child, and two rescued dogs.