Cobscook Bay, Moose Island, Maine
The season for harvesting alaria esculenta brings
wistful ecotourists wishing they, too, had dug in
years ago and worked the seabed, surf, and rocky
tidelines, gathering and drying, snipping the tender
bits into a self-sufficiency of miso soup and salad,
mulch, and anti-aging face creams.
And, as she presses her slick boot-heel into the foggy
roughness of the sand and settles on a flattish gabbro
outcrop in the chill of early May to stare longingly
into the pool where sea stars, limpets, whelks, winkles,
green crab, barnacles, blue muscles, and snails
drift and burrow in a small enormity of tidal forest,
she sways, leaning into the algae and sea-greenery,
with a long-ago memory of spines of winged kelp
thick against the green luminosity
of her salt-glazed cheek.
Her wet black hair is lost at sea.
KATE FALVEY is the author of a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). Read more.
“Cobscook Bay, Moose Island, Maine” appears as part of “Cora Visits the Seaweed Kingdom” in Deep Overstock, 18 (Fall, 2022).