“Native Species” by Rose McLarney

A new poem by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Construction Magazine:

It was nearly still water, that river,
with no rapids talking, but she learned from it
the fish. First, noticing the one with a hard
maw for scraping the algae she ate off stone,
then all the ways beings were made to live
in those parts.

Molly crawl bottom had a downturned mouth
for bottom feeding. The commonest
fish, living even in ditches, Mollies found ways
to make do. And she could identify them
in however much murk because of how long
she’d spent staring at the same places.

…

Continue reading online.