Pete Mackey
Image by Wouter de Jong on Pexels
Pete Mackey has been published in numerous venues, including Bangalore Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Eclectica, The Dewdrop, The Drabble, New Verse News, Global Poemic, Panoplyzine, and Third Wednesday. Pete is also a Pushcart Prize nominee. He also founded and runs a communications company that serves colleges, universities, and other non-profits across the U.S.
The Claw
The silhouettes of other shell hunters wavered between
sea and sky in the purple planes of dusk
pulled to the task of beauty as sure as the tide,
and my daughter sprung from my hand toward it all,
the pattern of little feet stretched out before me
in the supple sand, each emptiness filling with water
as she ran into the salt air and the world seeking
perfection, arms spread, ready to join aloft
the birds circling lives the tidal turn abandoned.
When I caught up, it was only because she had stopped,
and we watched, her shoulders in my hands, her body leaning
as if to avoid what she had stumbled upon,
the battle for more and hunger reaching its end,
the gull on the crab, raising its beak to swallow
what it had plucked, while one lone claw still attached,
protruded from the breast. When the sated seagull
ran into take-off, with wings wide to be carried
away, that claw still clung, like us, as long as it could.
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