~ Delta Poetry Review ~

John Davis Jr.

Grammar School Field Trip, 1986

In our toll-road town, the river does not mean commerce—

no industry, no mills, no money from the current

that churns and pulls through pines and palmettos.

Instead, the river means fossils. A barefoot rite

of passage for local children: burrowing toes

into bed sand under rust-colored water

to feel for sharks’ teeth or mammoth backbone segments.

Elementary science classes give us sole skill:

ability to read the river bottom by touch

of arch or heel submerged in present past revealed

by dinosaur-stepping—a slow and heavy precision.

We grow to expect bones and remains. We are praised

for molars and vertebrae extracted from sediment,

rinsed of burial grit by swift and ankle-deep eddies.

We’ve heard that somewhere south, the river ends

in ocean. Green waves with rolling white tops spread

like splayed metatarsals seeking foreign, modern coasts

where children with red plastic shovels dig up shells.

Here, our rough and ancient discoveries callous us,

thicken our artifact skin against tomorrow:

a time too easily found, too fragile to handle.

John Davis Jr. is the author of The Places That Hold (Eastover Press, 2021), Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014), and three other poetry collections. His work has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Nashville Review, and elsewhere over the last 25 years. He holds an MFA and teaches English and Creative Writing for Jesuit High School of Tampa, Florida.