Cars hiss on the wet streets. Rain dissipates the smell
of low tide, dried seaweed. The bay
spits up a tire swing: sunsick rubber, split rope.
You’d have to be crazy to call home
a strip of sand that will be underwater
in fifty years and oh,
my God, what does that make me?
Before slag and smelt and lead, this was clam country.
Then, during Prohibition, a causeway for bootleg,
the bottles dumped overboard at the sight of police.
Even now, barefoot, you might cut your feet
on hundred-year-old glass the bay purged.
I lean against the window, listen
for another rush of rain. I shouldn’t
be here: I’ve come home
the way rain returns to the earth only
to become runoff, to take with it whatever it can carry.
But don’t misunderstand: I’ll carry this
when the bay takes it all back. Call of the grackle,
whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams,
raw and red in their half-shells.
The harbor, insistent where it shifts against the gravel,
where turning cars leave, in their wake, infinity signs.
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.
