The piping plover, hailed one day each summer
for its resurgence in the Rockaways, Queens,
lives protected in camouflaged nests on the beach.
Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay,
the world’s prime supplier of soft-shell crab.
Home to four-hundred-sixty residents, where
water defines life, where home and religion matter.
The cahow re-emerged on Bermuda’s Nonsuch Island
after a three-hundred-year absence. It thrives amid
native flora, wildlife and limited access to man.
Shadowboxing Arctic hares, clinging jellyfish, bonebeds
and badlands on Fossil Freeway in South Dakota.
Me—I’m the woman with medicine in her voice,
a forest bather mating like a corpse plant, melting into time,
floating toward a twelfth life like a trumpeter swan.
Amy Barone’s poetry collection, We Became Summer, from New York Quarterly Books, was released in early 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing.) Barone’s poetry appears in Café Review, Paterson Literary Review, Sensitive Skin, and Standpoint (UK.) She lives in NYC.
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