in a wind-whipped anorak, a scarf over lips to collect
warmth, the head is a braided rope of egg bread.
My friend and I carry a paint bucket filled with seawater
toward the beach, mussels at the bottom these spirit-imbued
blades that burp, squint open. When we bend down,
tide pools take on our image: sunburned bridges of noses,
cheeks heated metal hammered by hours. He and I
are together again, after years of not speaking,
in a vastly different time, place, and headspace, and we cross
the pockmark of intertidal rocks encrusted with life, crabs
and sea stars crawling atop a carpet of barnacles, bivalves.
So much disappears on this earth, quick and quiet,
but these mussels keep growing back, spit beards,
byssus comb fastened to shore, to replenish the coast
each year if we let them. And here, among the tidal glut,
it’s like the world is still intact, more permanent
because we adapt to its currents, make its time our time.
We take only as much as we need, have picked up
where we left off, knowing more of ourselves,
the rhythms of the coast, where waves tumble like hair
down shoulders, our bodies dwarfed by cliffs
and pampas grass. We scrub shells clean, sit on the beach,
mince garlic and onions. Mussels open, fill
with what is now spoken in a boiled pot of butter, broth,
wine—clacks against the steel spoon when we stir
over the camping stove. Heads freshly baked in a new winter
ritual, we tear chunks away, dip bread and shell scoops
into the slurry, feed back into ourselves what the season gives.
—
Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet and translator and the author of three books of poetry, Curare (C&R Press, 2022), 2023 International Latino Book Awards, Silver Medal Winner; Reaper’s Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018); and Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017). His work has won the Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize, nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in numerous journals, including The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, CutBank, Fugue, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Nashville Review, and The South Carolina Review. He received his MFA from Old Dominion University and is currently based out of Oakland, California.
