Liza Katz Duncan: Bayshore Elegy

Cars hiss on the wet streets. Rain dissipates the smell 
of low tide, dried seaweed. The bay 
spits up a tire swing: sunsick rubber, split rope.

You’d have to be crazy to call home
a strip of sand that will be underwater
in fifty years and oh,

my God, what does that make me? 
Before slag and smelt and lead, this was clam country. 
Then, during Prohibition, a causeway for bootleg,
the bottles dumped overboard at the sight of police.

Even now, barefoot, you might cut your feet
on hundred-year-old glass the bay purged.
I lean against the window, listen

for another rush of rain. I shouldn’t
be here: I’ve come home
the way rain returns to the earth only
to become runoff, to take with it whatever it can carry.

But don’t misunderstand: I’ll carry this
when the bay takes it all back. Call of the grackle, 
whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams,

raw and red in their half shells. 
The harbor, insistent where it shifts against the gravel, 
where turning cars leave, in their wake, infinity signs.

Copyright Liza Katz Duncan. From Given (Autumn House, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize selected by Donika Kelly.

Liza Katz Duncan’s poems have appeared in AGNI, About Place, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Northwest, National Poetry Review and elsewhere. Given is her first poetry collection.