White pebbles assembled here.
They could easily be thumb bones
of sea turtle, Caretta caretta, or coned
teeth of bottle-nosed dolphins,
Tursiops truncatues, bycatch wasted.
My bare-toed probe proves
the white pebbles assembled
are Styrofoam, in nubs, more nubs,
unrecyclable, Homo sapiens sapiens’
droppings in clusters at high tide
line. We might have known. Too bad.
All this fresh gulf air stirs
her native appetite. Isn’t the take-
away crab shack somewhere nearby?
Award-winning poet, National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had work published in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has seven books to her credit, including Godwit: Poems of Canada, which received the 2009 Andrew Eiseman Writers Award for Poetry, and her recent chapbooks, The Urn and The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica, both from Finishing Line Press. Forthcoming is her full-length collection Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North, from Salmon Poetry. She also co-edited Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%, released in January 2012 from FootHills Publishing. You can read more about her and sample her poems and photographs at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com. Karla is a regular contributor to TCE.
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