Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan

By LIZA KATZ DUNCAN 

A White House against a blue sky, with a watertower on top.

Raritan Bayshore, New Jersey 


At the Old Aeromarine Site

First the marsh grass came, then the motherwort,
then bitterberry and honeysuckle. Blackbirds,
gulls and grackles built their nests.
Mourning doves call from the eaves
of the old factory, closed during the Depression,
though the building seems to be somewhat in use:
a No Trespassing sign, an Elton John song
coming in from someone’s bike stereo.
By the overgrown gate, a few trucks are parked,
and a trailer advising: Never Give Up
On Your Dreams! Own a Street Rod.
A friend sent me here to search for a rookery
of wading birds, but I haven’t found anything.
If they nested here at all, they’d be up to 90 feet high,
or buried in thickets of salt grass. Others, too, come here
when they don’t want to be found: on the guardrail
overlooking the bay, two teenage lovers
share a kiss, and then a joint, huffing
smoke into each other’s eyes, then startling
onto their backs, laughing. Late spring
a kind of emptying out: why
do I imagine they’re saying their goodbyes?

A river carves through a marshy patch of land

Keeping Track

This week’s unseasonable frost killed
the magnolia before bloom. Brittle-brown
frostbuds waiting to drop.

On his podcast, Joe says take notes,
record observations. Keep track
of changes over your lifetime,

your children’s, your grandchildren’s.
Through the open window, a train whistle,
fire trucks, and the laughter

of children across the creek, a creek so small
Google Maps doesn’t register it as water.
I always take the same photo,

though there will be no children, no
grandchildren—whose lifetime, then,
is this for? I give myself permission

to be supremely selfish. At the creek, a catbird
on a cairn. Crabs skitter across the muddy
shoreline. Felled trees will become the pages
where we chart swells and falls, flames and ashes.

 

Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which won the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNIAbout Placethe Kenyon Review, Poem-a-DayPoetry, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Liza grew up in New Jersey and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She teaches English as a Second Language in New Jersey public schools.

Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan

Related Posts

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

cover of "Civilians"

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.

Lizard perched on a piece of wood.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Before learning to walk / and before I’d fallen upon the wet earth / already my heart hummed in three tones. / Even when my steps were still clumsy, / I already held three consciousnesses. // Long before my baptism, / already my three nahuals were running