Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is Cassie Pruyn, a New Orleans-based writer, born and raised in Portland, Maine. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, she is the author of “Bayou St. John: A Brief History,” published by The History Press 2017, and “Lena,” winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, published by Texas Tech University Press 2017.
Maine Morning, Age 5
By Cassie Pruyn
Through my bedroom window,
I spot a peach-colored fish
Stuck between stones in the old stone wall.
I imagine she’s been beached,
But once I slap through the screened door,
Leaping past the snake’s rustle,
I find it’s just another rock torn
By a farmer’s plunging knuckles
From the landscape’s lap,
And propped atop the assemblage.
No longer a she, it’s a dead fact.
But why is it pinkish-orange?
Bleached by years of sun, I think,
And further bleached by ice.
Grooved with fins of rain, I think.
Mistaken nearly twice.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
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