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Judson Evans

Stranded

Mass stranding of red-tide squid the kids bag them for bait.

The scatter art of razor clams severed crustacean

appendages. Flattened globes well out of blow holes

in wet sand. Ropy tributaries leech ochres blowing out snot

in condoms of cytoplasm. The neurotoxin twitch

of sandworms living screws in the rusty muck flats. Our own eyes

simmer on unearthed surfaces corrosive and collapsing.

Even the dog from puppyhood terrified of the sly movements of liquids

follows us out too far on momentary sand bars up to his chest in shifting

islands and shoals. When I call to you far across the kelp and eaten eye

of the sea bass and sprint to lure the dog from rolling in the mess

of scales and cartilage the whole sky goes bilious Portuguese

man-of- war purple spotted with carmines and crime stories

of scattered carbon back to where you are looking too.

Everything looks back.

                   all cracked open
                   a thousand tiny shells
                   in our footprints

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About the Author

Judson Evans is a full-time Professor of Liberal Arts at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches Poetry Workshops focusing on haiku, haibun, and renku, and a Visual Studies course on Paleolithic Cave Art. His collaborative book of lyric poems responding to cave painting, Chalk Song, will be published by Lilly Press, Boston, in fall 2021.