Poems by L.A. Weeks

Crab Country Litany

by L.A. Weeks

From Canary Fall 2018

L.A. Weeks grew up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. She now lives near Hood Creek, part of the Cape Fear River Basin.

Let the ocean dazzle; if we build on today’s sliver, let us
       build for today.
Let it bring in a haul of horizons.
Let Spartina stretch forever to our fathers’ crab pots.
Let the fog horn find its berth between midnight and
       morning.
Let sherry propose marriage to roe. Let it dally with
       Old Bay.
Let the carrier group be gray as it rounds Cape Henry.
Let red shift restlessly at the pier.
Let July’s bathtub foam with sting.
Let a cracked claw shatter winter.
Let the salt marsh oracle buzz beyond ocean’s heft.
Let us be smaller than the unborn in a Mermaid’s Purse.
Let us lie pungent at noon on a tide line we cannot claim.
Let tomorrow’s cyclone devour the spit and what we built
       for today.

First appeared in Alabama Literary Review 2013 Vol. 22, Number 1.

© L.A. Weeks

In Paradise

by L.A. Weeks

From Canary Summer 2018

In paradise, a mockingbird sings ungodly.
Weed whacker! Weed whacker! it tremolos,
backed by the highway’s predawn thrum.

The highway billboard glows, Take Next Right to Paradise

(where hardy palms dot clear-cut bottomland,
and golf carts cruise the hedge-trimmed deer paths).
Here, nestlings fall with the tangles of a cast-off paradise.

At daybreak, mockingbirds feast on Army Worms;
tomorrow’s liquid application will restore
the lawns of paradise. Then, cannas, begonias,

and banana trees will be fertilized with chemicals
simulating forest floor–loamy bits of leaf and wing
bagged and sold to the song of windup birds in paradise.

© L.A. Weeks

Tidewater

by L.A. Weeks

From Canary Fall 2018

The old beach road–how to say it?
Crunch of oyster shell pavement,
a salt marsh canticle woven through–
trill and hum creek-split to single notes
in the bay. The old beach road–where it ended
as a loose shift of dunes and how beyond them,
the sea would chant itself undone.

Tonight, my headlights join a blur
spanning every inlet. I pass high-rise and strip mall
without a word. How wave-beat rip rap
confesses shells ground fine by tires.
How expansion joints in a bridge
thump out a sentence–how desire
overruns a plain, covers even its remembrance.