S. H. Jackson
The fog springs up down river,
hurdles the distant piles
then strides toward ours.
The full moon,
decoration in afternoon,
is now the only sure light;
its white flare
features black water.
We are weary.
We have three bream and a mudcat
on the stringer,
one piece of a night crawler
in the Styrofoam cup.
She digs it out,
I hook it.
The fog upon us,
the fog upon us,
we sit together
in damp sand
and make a final
ploy.
Thoughts the Third Week You Were Doing
Offshore Oil Work and Had Not Called Me
Cindy Childress
Today I rearranged my coat rack
and found the insulated jacket you bought
last time you were in Iceland.
The tag says 66 degrees North, Polartek.
I put the jacket on, sleeves hanging nearly to my knees,
and inhaled your scent—a salty musk
that conjured your arms around me
for an instant.
Before you left home for this job
you showed me the rig’s coordinates on a map
and measured the distance to shore.
Nine nautical miles.
You said you’d be able to use your cell phone,
that there would be internet access on the rig,
and so I made you promise to keep in touch
though I knew I wouldn’t hear from you.
I take no satisfaction in being right,
and despite your saying you’d be out
for less than a month
I know not to hope too hard
for anything I can’t control,
yet I wore your jacket this afternoon
to the mailbox, then the grocery store,
then to have martinis with a friend
who politely pretended not to notice
how I kept pushing up the sleeves
and pressing the collar to my face
irritated, but
unwilling to take it off.
Bethlehem Steel
Kenneth Elliott
Street lights Morsed luminous on the Key Bridge.
I could almost read the words of their warming.
But I was tired. I was sick. I had things to do
and did not rest on the highway’s narrow shoulder
to freeze the scene in a photograph,
did not shoot the industrial backwash
of tanks and tubes set in a marsh
coming back on its own
with swamp-weed, crab, and corrosive wind,
or Bethlehem Steel rusting more coagulate
than human skin could bear, rusting
at the water’s edge as the bay surged inland.
The buildings hunched empty and impotent
against the water’s reclamation.
But I remember.
I remember the way my car sucked the frigid night
into the cabin, my hands wrapped in a poverty of socks.
I remember the “to do to do to do” litany
of tires over tar streaks and my wife
clicking her icy fingers against the dash.
And I remember the bridge,
thresheld by steel as it bellied up and out
over a thin finger of water.
She looked back across the bay toward Bethlehem,
its southern wall slouched against the bourn.
“We could move in there,” she said.
“Someplace more picturesque
with a view of the bridge,
someplace wilder and windier.”
The Best Deer Tracker in Northern Louisiana
Ronald Moran
I took a number, 53, in the meat section of the Fresh Market,
to wait my turn
to buy eight large shrimp for Jane and me to dip in a spicy sauce,
a small thing
but big on pleasure for us, as number 52, a thin, well-dressed,
twitchy woman,
was being waited on at the fish case, pondering this,
then that,
while the butcher was patiently counting his fingers
for good luck,
since number 52 could not decide between Tilapia
or Sashimi Tuna,
or how to prepare each, asking the butcher, who was
not a gourmet chef,
how he would prepare the dish for her 16 guests
for dinner tomorrow.
O how he wished he had a gourmet recipe book in back
so he could say,
Excuse me M’am, I think I have just the dish for you
and your guests;
while in between her questions and the intimacy
with which she rattled
off
her own recipes of Sockeye Salmon and Orange Roughy,
the butcher
began fingering the blade of his fish knife, as if he were
priming it,
when I thought of a friend of over 40 years ago, Lowell,
the best
deer tracker in northern Louisiana, who used to fish
for giant cats
with his fingers, under stumps, and raise them up with
bloody fingers,
not feeling any pain then or ever, and who replaced
all uppers and lowers
with false teeth in one day, and then I imagined him
as one of her guests
tomorrow night, all seated at the table, and Lowell telling
them his stories
as she watched her Tilapia or Sahimi Tuna turning into
a giant cat,
as blood dripped down Lowell’s arm and him flashing
his new smile
to her and her 16 guests, and maybe her husband,
if she had one;
and as the giant cat took shape, its spine slashing about,
its whiskers red,
her leaving the table, without excusing herself, and not
returning.
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