Between Catch and Release
Playa Blanca, Mexico
The man’s fishing pole looks like it might bend in half as he struggles
to reel it in, knee-deep in the tide. Early morning,
no one else on the wide swath of sand but two young men
setting up the beachfront restaurant. The same two men
who laughed with us last night about a crocodile they caught,
made into tacos. One presented my wife with one white tooth.
Now they come running. No words are spoken as they help
haul this stingray to shore, one holding down the dangerous tail.
The fisherman takes his time working free each treble hook barb
from the pale underside. The belly? The face?
The eyes are on top, watching, when it is turned over,
an exotic creature that does not belong on dry land.
He slides his hands under it the way my mother
would lift a rolled out pie crust to lay it over a pan of fruit,
spreading his arms wide to cradle each wing-like fin.
These days in our country, I can forget such tenderness exists.
He wades into the ocean to release the ray and it slips into the waves,
rippling like silk as it swims away.
*
Pam Crow is an award-winning poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. Pam’s work has been published in Green Mountain Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and other national journals. She is the winner of the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writers award and the Neil Shepard award for poetry. Her book Inside This House was published by Main Street Rag press in 2008.
