Three poems

By Rena J. Mosteirin

Your Blue Hands Light the North 

If whales, harpoons and swordfish 

make you crazy to go to sea, 

then go on, Ishmael, go to the fire 

to rid yourself of this smoke. 

You travel your thousand miles 

to go to sea. The magnetic virtue 

of you and your ship hold the sea holy.

Now you and the poor poet of Tennessee 

wish to visit the prairies in June 

with a man who stays in Saturday night and

remains clean. He came to anchor here, out of

sight of land. The green fields are gone. 

If some old hunks of a sea captain 

can warm his blue hands  

by holding them up to the northern

lights, then go on, Ishmael, obey that old

hunks.

Any Wind but the Levanter 

…Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might  blow Moby-Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle… 

Herman Melville 

Nights in middle-winter the red light blinks  

small flashes of paranoia over the mountains. 

First haymaking then corn harvest  

then apple gathering and a year’s worth of wind: 

Monsoons Pampas Nor-westers Harmattans  

Trades Just listen—the animals are night-hunting now. 

It was enough just to get on the Pequod. 

Enough to hide in the captain’s cabin  

with a sharp knife/ to cut my man off the stake 

where he tied himself most every night. 

When the winds ride the sky from side to side, 

what reaches out? What stays curled, hidden? 

When we sail off the edge of the world, 

I want some Sunday music to survive.

We Fish at Night

How long is this stretch of tin foil eyes

floating at the surface, looking at me

like I know what’s going on, when all I know

is that the seals are singing sad songs?

Were their songs always this sad?

Did listening at night always fill my mouth with ashes?

What else died down there that we can’t see?

What happened here?

Fertilizers washed down, made the aquatic plants

overgrow, took too much oxygen, and suffocated the fish.

Their dying smell makes ashes in my throat.

They say the big fish know hooks and take them

in their mouths anyway. If that’s true, then they

also know drowning. Normally we come to this dock at night

hoping to catch mackerel, as they make good live bait

for catching the bigger, farther-out fish: stripers and cod and tuna.

Tonight we won’t sleep. Tomorrow when we take

the boat out how far will we have to go to see living fish?

The tin foil eyes of our ancestors

are on us now. We are drowning.

Rena J. Mosteirin is the author of Disaster Tourism (BOA Editions, forthcoming) and Experiment 116 (Counterpath Press, 2021). Mosteirin is co-author, with James E. Dobson, of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) and Perceptron (punctum books, forthcoming). Her novella Nick Trail’s Thumb won the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, judged by Lydia Davis. Her work has been published or is forthcoming from The New England Review, The Common, The Rumpus, New York Magazine, The Southampton Review, no tokens, The Puritan and elsewhere in print and online. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.