Mindful | Entry Way by Kim Suttell
Chiara Di Lello | Shrimp (A Love Poem)
It sounds like bickering but I realize it’s not: the couple
shuffles just ahead of us toward the seafood department
one gesturing from captain’s seat behind the cart’s
handlebar and one leaning into the cold case. Get some
salmon, too. Where? Right there. Not the eight ounces,
get the twelve, and it’s the loving exasperation, my sudden
certainty that they’ve done this a thousand, ten thousand times
that they’ve gone back and forth about whether to get
the farmed shrimp or wild, which kind is the bad one and
why pay more when we could just peel them ourselves?
By the time we are their age there may not be any shrimp
left tangoing in the trash-choked, superheated Pacific
and this store might be transformed to warehouse
FEMA supplies for climate refugees, our post-industrial town
may be islanded by rising sea levels and our house might sink
into the creek on the next lot but at least this is true:
when I move to nudge you and quietly point out the couple
I find your eyes and you are already looking at me, beaming
as we look with full hearts at what we hope against all odds to become.
shuffles just ahead of us toward the seafood department
one gesturing from captain’s seat behind the cart’s
handlebar and one leaning into the cold case. Get some
salmon, too. Where? Right there. Not the eight ounces,
get the twelve, and it’s the loving exasperation, my sudden
certainty that they’ve done this a thousand, ten thousand times
that they’ve gone back and forth about whether to get
the farmed shrimp or wild, which kind is the bad one and
why pay more when we could just peel them ourselves?
By the time we are their age there may not be any shrimp
left tangoing in the trash-choked, superheated Pacific
and this store might be transformed to warehouse
FEMA supplies for climate refugees, our post-industrial town
may be islanded by rising sea levels and our house might sink
into the creek on the next lot but at least this is true:
when I move to nudge you and quietly point out the couple
I find your eyes and you are already looking at me, beaming
as we look with full hearts at what we hope against all odds to become.
Chiara Di Lello is a writer and educator. She delights in public art, public libraries, and getting improbable places by bicycle. For a city kid, she has a surprisingly strong interest in beekeeping. Find her poems in Rust + Moth, Parentheses Journal, Whale Road Review, and Best New Poets, and on Twitter: @thetinydynamo.
Kim Suttell is a collagist just emerging from a career in bureaucracy and spreadsheets. Paper, as her medium, speaks in torn edges, subtle curls, and tiny glimpses of previous use. The grid template references both quilts and ledgers, places where individual pieces must interact to create a new whole. It is the point to limit the format so that color, texture, and fragmentary images make their own movement and meaning.
Instagram: Page48paperart
Instagram: Page48paperart
