ALIESA ZOECKLEIN

VACATION KEEPSAKE

Shell hash wet in my hands, shark’s tooth, whale bone, 

any marvelous thing to mark this day

of barnacles clustered in galaxies around pilings, 

the thwack-thwack of boat bottoms on water, 

a line of white pelicans floating in sunset air above me. 

Wrack line, swash zone, the wind gift of so much surprise.

            And then a plover steps into a mass of fishing line.

I have stopped my shelling to look through binoculars 

at sandpipers, willets, and this plover at just the moment 

of entanglement. The slender lower leg, the ankle, held now

to a block of washed-up wood around which fishing line 

is wound and wound. The pale skin of the left leg,

the tendons flexing, the leg, the foot, shaking, shaking. 

Aliesa Zoecklein has poems published in Copper Nickel, Posit, Carolina Quarterly, and Peacock Journal, among others. In 2014, her chapbook At Each Moment, Air won the Peter Meinke Award and was published by YellowJacket Press. Aliesa lives with her wife in Gainesville, Florida, where she teaches writing at Santa Fe College.