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