Winner of the 2025 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival.
We argue, at the end of the workday, about which one of us smells
the worst and you always win – you, smelling like the backside
of low tide, after a day hauling mooring chains out of mudflats,
wearing some settled sediment that hasn’t had a breath of fresh air
since the glaciers retreated and whatever microbial remains
of the alewives, the herring, the elvers that slipped the nets.
There are chickens down there too, long since stewed into silt,
Leftover from the days when the poultry plant processed everything
right into the bay, and local residents raked feathers
off their lawns and the whole harbor glistened with a sheen
of chicken fat, when prosperity was a barnful of broilers.
They say it all went belly-up that day in the eighties, when hunger
rolled into town and the processing plant shut down. And now,
well, now here you are, dropping mooring stones
in that bone rich broth to anchor the pleasure boats that float
the town now that the river’s cleaned up and main street
got a facelift. Nostalgia is a tourist economy in a coastal town,
where longing only skims the surface of decomposition,
but every day you come home, ripe as a barrel of baitfish,
reminding me what we’re made of.
Joy Longfellow
Joy Longfellow lives and writes in mid-coast Maine. In 2025, she won first prize in the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. When she is not writing poems, she is probably in her garden or trying to fix her old house.
