David Oestreich lives in Northwest Ohio
with his wife and three children. His work has recently appeared or is
forthcoming in Minnetonka Review, Ruminate, Hobble Creek Review, and
Tar River Poetry.
on pin-bone frames; others floated in lake-weed nets,
drew no gull or fly; we were the only living things
as our parents lay on the beach like driftwood
This poem
recalls a trip my family took (during my childhood) to Michigan's upper
peninsula. In the mid-1970s Lake Michigan experienced an alewife
die-off of startling proportions, and the beach scene I describe is
without exaggeration. I remember kicking aside the scattered,
dead fish in order to have a clean area to lay my towel. Many
years later, the macabre surreality of that environmental dysfunction
struck me as an appropriate means of describing relational
distance.
