fish hooks & cut paper

by Leah C. Stetson

The windows were broken to eat you alive.
      Slicked with ink and thin paper, my hands,
            Under-appreciated, unhinged — even thrived
                  Despite the lackluster smidgen of damp sand.

I am at the beach, plump with rainwater, lobster-carnage
      This cool foggy summer — the island, laughing, Pristine?
            It stays true to that cold hardiness, a coastal colláge
                    In rescuing the wild form, a soft mossy sea green.

That said, a spiny siren records her catches: a hummingbird,
      Spring break engineering majors, monsoon storms, a queen
            Flown, thrown and blown through cut paper latches
                    Burn off their spines, it is not that damage-repair thing.

Poised to scream out lots of terrible bare-tree lines
      Because he was suffering in private gardens,
            Clad in welding gloves, a fish hook thought of a tongue
                    Like a sermon of my father’s, to dig up tender globes,

I re-imagined my artichoke romance in a green-muraled dining room, l
      Living proof that their purple-blue thistle havens were worth the effort
            Licking fingers and lovers along the edges of a slip-covered coast
                    Without shells or throw pillows or souvenirs.

The vivid art of dreaming pins a spooky piece
    I kept trying to save Saturn or Uranus, those cruel outer planets
            Hoping for a robust shape-shifter scientist to save the dying seas;
                    It’s not a giant ball of recycled gyotaku doused with kerosene.

Leah C. Stetson writes poetry with an eco-bent. She is currently on a quest to study the deep, dark-Romantic ecology of marshes & estuarine systems, as a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary PhD program at University of Maine. Leah swims in open water five months out of the year in the Gulf of Maine – without a wetsuit. Find her posts @StrangeWetlands on Twitter.