Image by Juliana Toro

Poetry Cape Neddick

Talin Tahajian

From this angle, the geese look like they’re making
one straight line. The same grey borzoi
flickers against the shoreline, saint of New England
candlewick. Another dog moves like a white
spirit of the water. His red ball is caught
because it’s thrown. Then the soot goes up.
The tide abandons what it leaves, I think, being
as usual wrong. I pick up two clamshells, one
with a perfect hole in it, a translucent
green crab, and a bleached lobster claw
that’s lost its thumb. How will I say goodbye now.

Talin Tahajian is from Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Best New Poets, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine, Pleiades, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, West Branch, and elsewhere. She’s a PhD student in English at Yale and an assistant editor of The Yale Review.