Poetry by Ashley Wagner

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​​​Old Bay (A Play in Three Acts)

                  for Dad


I.

I’m afraid I’ll lose you
before our time is up.

II.

So let’s spend what time
we’ve got
tipping back tall glasses
of Coke sweating
in our palms under
the velvet-blue August sky.
I have a deck now
where we can sit
in the shade of my red-brick building
as the sun dips below
the holy dome of St. Philip
and James. Forgive me,
some boards are loose.
You’ll have to parallel park
two blocks away.
The humidity in this city
is near enough to drown a man.

But of course
there will be crabs galore!

I’ll set out tins of Old Bay,
drape newsprint over the table, 
draw a pot of butter
on the new stove,
and we’ll talk of
the trivial things
as the heat works it soft.

Your work-hard hands could crack
claws in two. You could show me
how to clean out the gunk and the gills,
find the pearly meat beneath, gleaming
like clam spit, a morsel of treasure. Tell me
about trapping crabs at Harold Harbor as a boy,
about lunch breaks in your thirties:
two joints and a sandwich
at the foot of the Embassy.
All I can offer in return are poems
I wrote far from home,
from Maryland,
from you,
where roads had names
like Blue Jay and Conifer
and tiny women in slippers
sold bonsai from a van.

Spice-lulled and full,
we could settle
into silence when words
no longer serve us.

III.

It’s not naïve to want
to make the world a better place
and I want to start here
with you: two chins drawn skyward,
two of a kind in their joy; two mouths,
just alike, telling tales
of what went right.



Ashley Wagner is a queer writer, reader, and roller-skater living in Baltimore. She is the poetry editor for Ligeia Magazine, and she is currently working on her first collection of poetry, EAST COAST BLUES.