Mollusk

Pink mucket, wartyback, catspaw.
We are all endangered:

Your mother, mine, a young traveler
who never makes it home.

Just check your phone,
filter feeder of grief.

Ming, a bivalve mollusk,
lived 500 years.

I weep
for his longevity.

This earth is ringed
tight as a mussel.

Forgive me: I have been thinking
of death nearly since birth.

I am soft-bellied.
Take me first.

Don’t leave me burrowed.
Gasping for air.

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Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press, 2012), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, The New York Times, and others. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen, is coming from Hobblebush Books in September 2020. Kyle lives in Southern New Hampshire.