Gloucester Dock
photo by Allison Guan
by Maureen Mancini Amaturo
This New England morning wears a grey shawl.
Traffic, lights, store fronts, and footsteps recede with the tide.
A shy sun finds gulls laughing, cackling, and circling pewter views.
Water slaps piers and boat bottoms.
Dories waltz.
Rusted chains hang like necklaces around rigging and pilings
Pitted metal anchors lean heavy.
Faded circles bearing ship names no longer save lives.
Ropes, thick and strong, twined and defined like teen-aged braids
enwreathe coiled hoses, nozzles down, as if humble in prayer.
Bent, arthritic cages — browned with age, crusted with bird droppings,
hinges not what they used to be — hold nothing.
Gulls release their catches from the sky to crack against the ground.
Shells open, and they return to feast on oyster and mussel meat.
Booms and gaffs sleep.
Schooner sails, not hoisted, bound to those wooden arms at rest
gathered and bundled, tied and cradled in tangles of triangle halyards
twisted and knotted to beams and masts, a riot of ropes, a chorus of lines
weaving through pulleys and chains, pin stripes in the sky.
A sky so grey the chilled wind can’t clear it
or erase the harbor’s powerful smell — heavy, foul even —
an all-natural mix — wet wood, salt, and sea life both rotted and fresh,
an odor old and always.
Fog, or ghosts, cloud and crowd a quiet present
baiting the past
whispering of mutinies
trolling for secrets.
The pier now grey, unlike greying fishermen, lives many lives.
Maureen Mancini Amaturo, NY-based, award-winning fashion/beauty writer with an MFA in Creative Writing, teaches writing, founded and leads Sound Shore Writers Group, and produces literary and gallery events. Her fiction, essays, creative non-fiction, poetry, and comedy are widely published and appear in more than 100 magazines, literary journals, and anthologies globally. Maureen was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award and TDS Creative Fiction Award and was awarded Honorable Mention and Certificate of Excellence in poetry from Havik Literary Journal. Her work was shortlisted by Reedsy and by Flash Fiction Magazine for their Editor’s Choice Award. Funny Pearls UK named her work as a best short story selection for '23. A handwriting analyst diagnosed her with an overdeveloped imagination. She’s working to live up to that.
Allison Guan is a poet and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area. In her free time, she can be found falling down Wikipedia rabbit-holes and figuratively consuming textbook pages.
