MOLLUSK

Tuesday, and the old fish market is

a diorama of oddities. Curved whisker,

flannelled paunch, pincers groping

in the grotesque light. The sad bucket

of guts tucked efficiently under

a counter, residue of our dismay. I

remember August, when it wasn’t cool

even at daybreak and we ran, huffing

despite ourselves, the moon vaporizing

at our backs. You twisted an ankle and

we both laughed, I half-cruelly, you

with a wistful admiration for the body

holding out its hand to deadness.

Suspending itself in the cooked air.

Our knuckles and our houses, friend,

they’re going to rot. Every fiction

ends with this: the dog sniffing

unceasingly at nothing, absence

sneaking around us like a re-gifted

scarf, puzzles and clams until we are

set to burst with doing and undoing.

Until we shut ourselves quietly in.

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Harpur Palate, The Normal School, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. She will be attending the MFA program in poetry at the University of California, Irvine this fall.