Octopus
In early-hour half-light, he launches
the thirty-foot trawler, ten hours
of bending, dragging, pulls a hard
living from Falmouth Bay, deep
coves, ragged map of tunnels,
water so clear the algae’s
pile can be gauged from the cliff: thin
lime, emerald, evergreen velour.
Rubberized pants circle his waist,
cinched in back, straps over scrappy
shoulders, knife tucked into loop.
He leans over new catch
in stacked crates, blankets the open
top with a towel. Plastic containers
winch, swing boat to air, ocean
tumbling through the holes. And then:
Tentacles flail softly from the middle
carton’s wall. Some shorter,
some long, smooth, tapered,
white, pink edges. Rows
of suckers ripple as the sleek flesh
twists. The small crowd awaiting
a ferry is riveted. How can agile
ropes of muscle be so opaline,
so lush? Is the octopus reaching
for one more hold? They picture
the creature recoiling from dock, turning
to sea, turquoise surging beneath
somber sky. It dives into silver-
black caverns, slices the dark,
squeezes into eelgrass, crevice,
fends off veils of wafting net.
Annette Sisson is the author of Small Fish in High Branches (Glass Lyre Press (May 2022) and Winter Sharp with Apples, which is currently questing for a home. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Lascaux Review, Cider Press Review, Glassworks, Aeolian Harp Anthology, and many others. She won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s 2019 Poetry Prize, and her poems have placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, and several other contests; in 2023, two were nominated for The Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Net.