15 August 2006

Mary Rose O'Reilley

[from Mary Rose O’Reilley’s Half Wild, 2006, winner of the 2005 Walt Whitman Award]

The Girl They Caught

Sometime after midnight
they cut the 12-horse Evinrude,
their boat bumps at the dock.

Your kitchen lamp
defines a cribbage game.
Everything dark is holding.

I hear them come in
without knocking.
They carry the girl in a quilt.

You twist the lure
caught in her lip, snip the barb,
and back it out of her mouth.

I hear their boots on the dock,
their coddling way with the girl,
whimpering now.



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