Liza Katz Duncan

Vessels

On the bulkhead, someone has made a line
of horseshoe crab shells, a dozen or so
in neat single file, facing the bay—
or at least, that’s where I thought
their faces would be; in fact
the horseshoe crab has nine eyes:
top, sides, belly—
facing, then, everywhere but
the home that did them in, and their
once-inhabitants. At some point, every vessel
has to watch its contents die:
sinking ship, vase of cut flowers,
a tumble of crows from the nest.

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Liza Katz Duncan is a poet and teacher in New Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, Vinyl, Phoebe, The Journal of New Jersey Poets and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.