Twice a lunar day the ocean pulls away
from the shoreline’s slotted, fissured rocks,
muttering thunder, thumping echoes.
Black-turbaned Tegula clench their shells.
Verrucose anemones leak water
like abandoned mattresses.
The tidepools warm like bathtubs.
A tidepool holds a small child’s gaze.
Brown turban shells move beneath the water
among porcelain crabs and periwinkles.
A hermit crab touches, grasps, and rolls a vitreous shell,
scutters when pudgy fingers pinch and lift the shell up.
The crab selects a dented plastic cap and snaps its body inside.
Diseased and wasting, a sea star has lost its arms, which curl
like orange peels. The tidepool warms like a bathtub.
A child’s mother removes his diaper and drops it on the rocks.
Just this one mother. Just this one child’s diaper.
Twice a lunar day the ocean pushes back in,
sweeping boulders, filling basins, mopping.
As if it were a janitor assigned
to filling black garbage bags for disposal
in the deep and cold.
—
Annie Cody Holdren lives in the Monterey Bay area of California. Her professional career has centered on interpreting and writing about archaeology and natural history. She has had poems published in Catamaran, Nostos, Frogpond, Canary, Kerning, and others.
