Laura Da – Poetry

Cryptic Clicks

 

Giddy with his new discovery

of measurement, my son dips

 

a discarded plastic zip tie into the water.

He drags a diamond into the sand

 

with his heel, surveys the receding tide

in a frenzy then shucks his shoes

 

to climb the silver fluke of a scuffed statue.

Two women near the swings

 

sip coffee and squint into the horizon

as they debate The Indian Child Welfare Act.

 

J Pod is sometimes sighted

in the deep channel off Alki Beach,

 

speaking a language, scientists hypothesize,

unique unto itself.

 

The smallest of the two women

tugs at her top and shivers,

 

latching an infant to her breast

then zipping her back

 

into the neoprene shell of her ski coat.

Chilled and tired, my son

 

raises his arms to be carried.

At our feet, two girls sing

 

a call and response from a pre-school cartoon:

Shapes are everywhere.

 

They sit toe to toe in the sandbox

rolling a ball back and forth.

 

They’re in everything we chose to see.

Like me, like them, my son

 

tends to follow statements

with a laid back affirmative.

Northwestern:  you know what I mean?

After his birth, I pumped milk

 

all through the early mornings

with one manic eye

 

to the nature documentaries on Nova.

Scratchy footage from the year of my birth

 

showed marine park employees

catching juvenile whales in the Puget Sound.

 

My own output was meager and lavender skim.

One time in ten,

 

fumbling exhausted, I poured the milk

straight into the bottle, plastic liner forgotten

 

so that it splashed weakly

across the granite countertop,

 

rendering the weak, synthetic wail

that could be programed into the breast pump

 

to enhance the let-down reaction, unnecessary.

When I was small,

 

my mom once confessed

her great wish

 

to jump from the back

of a ferry and swim

 

back to her childhood

vacation home on Orcas Island.

 

My finger traced the white spots

on a killer whale key chain

 

as she talked, stunned by her audacity

to yearn for anything but me.

 

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Laura Da’ is a poet and a public school teacher.  A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts.  Da’ is an enrolled member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.  She has published poems in Prairie Schooner, Hanging Loose, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.   Her first chapbook,The Tecumseh Motel, is soon to be published in Effigies II, and the University of Arizona Press will publish her first full-length manuscript, Tributaries, in 2015. Da’ lives near Seattle with her husband and son.