Ocean, every so often, a kitchen tile or child’s toy
rises from you, years after the hurricane’s passed.
This time, the disaster was somewhere else.
The disaster was always somewhere else, until it wasn’t.
Punctuation of the morning after: comma between
red sky and sailors’ warning; white space where a storm cloud lowers.
Where the bay breaks away, the sentence ends: a waning
crescent of peninsula, barely visible
but for the broken buildings, the ambulance lights.
Ocean, even now, even shaken, you hold the memory
of words, of worlds that failed slowly, then all at once.
A flotilla of gulls falls onto you, mourners draped in slate.
This poem first appeared in Given (Autumn House Press, 2023).
—
Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which received the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award and the Laurel Prize for Best International First Collection. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Common, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. A 2024-25 Climate Resiliency Fellow, she lives in New Jersey (Lenni-Lenape) where she teaches multilingual learners.
