POETRY

Is Wrack, Is Rak, Is Wreckage

By Allison Hutchcraft     VOLUME 57 No. 1

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Is seaweed, is a tangle of riches,
names in a fleet--egg wrack,

knotted wrack, wig wrack, sea lock
threading edges to the White Sea.

Is cemetery, field of notch and rock,
is bounty to the periwinkles

silently feeding. Is frond, not stalked,
floating without a midrib.

Quiet. I am listening to the wrack
as it crackles and spits

on dry ledges.
I can feel

each tentacle splayed,
powdered with salt. First film. Then

slippery—pull hard, it is taut
and won’t release. I wasn’t taught

to do this--look but don’t touch,
don’t manage the rudder, don’t pull

the anchor up, hand over stinging hand,
gunwale gleaming. I am

racking up years, wracking them--
they slide and hit against the hull,

they are surface floaters and won’t
sink, they build into a flowering

that can’t be cut back,
though I scuba with scissors,

though I snap each off at its holdfast.
Another rack of clouds

reels across a country
of shade, and I’m still here,

a wreckage in each hand,
a head full of blue.

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ALLISON HUTCHCRAFT is the author of Swale (New Issues, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.


VOLUME 57 No. 1