Samantha DeFlitch

---

---

Front Half of a Squid

When I asked the nearest naturalist to name
a long, shimmering animal that clung to a soft
clam shell in the touch tank, he laughed and
called it the front half of a squid. I suppose those
Jonas and rock crabs had to eat something,
and even the suffering can do a remarkable
imitation of thriving. Listen: a sick woman
is a clearcut where most of the standing trees
are logged at the same time and few remain
post-harvest. She is a barn swallow beating
her body against the house. She is an opossum,
thirteen clinging joeys & a highway to cross.

Inside the one-room laboratory, directly across
the gangplank from the rock crab touch tank,
there is a collection of bird skins. From a great
distance, some of them appear living: the puffin
perched on thick slabs of shale; two miniature
screech owls, wings raised as though arguing;
a dark-eyed junco, head tilted to stare curiously
at anyone rummaging through the file cabinets.
I half-expected them to take flight: an error
in perception, how I believed the bright squid
would God itself, return to the ocean floor.
How I thought everything with a body was alive.

---

---

---

---

SAMANTHA DEFLITCH is the author of Confluence (Broadstone Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, The Missouri Review, Colorado Review, and Appalachian Review, among others. She lives in New Hampshire.