~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Carroll Beauvais

Fishing Tournament Triptych

Memorial Day bringing

in the summer and the charter

boats coast to the weighing

station. You are the winner

holding the 6 ft. blue

marlin. I peel shrimp and you

eat them. On the shore, you toss High Life while I dredge

for shells. Sunset slips behind the gulf’s edge.

You belonged to the docks first.

A lifetime, I waited and wished

for you, but your thirst

was multitudinous—for salt, fish,

drink. Your skin tanned bronze,

your shadow moon-pale, a dry pond,

till all I had of you was a trophy on a shelf.

All I find of you is more of myself.

On the wharf, over fishing

poles, the sun comes back again. If

we start swimming

with the mackerel, it seems we might catch it

from the cruel edge it once slipped

off. That summer, the winds howled

and the waterspouts whirled. You could see the mackerel

jump in the sun just before the rains fell.

Carroll Beauvais's first book, Preverbal, is forthcoming from Lit Fox Books in 2025 and poems have appeared in The Collagist, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and has been named a finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollack Poetry Prizes from the University of Wisconsin Press. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and teaches at Boston University.