It's Still Life

This “Framed Poem” is written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story, Poetry Slam on 27 August

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I had been content to sit and listen as one poet after another stepped into the small pool of light, when the woman at the microphone looked directly at me, smiled as though we had already shared some confidence, and without a word held out her hand toward the stage — I obliged, introduced my poem, and began:

The Law of Finders

An orange shipping container
washed ashore this morning,
paint chipped, stripped, peeling,

“I didn’t know steel could float,” I said,

when a woman with sun-battered skin
and wearing the quiet calm of a shark
appeared beside me.

She dragged a seaman’s canvas bag
behind her like a corpse,
stooped and scooped
yellow rubber ducks,
squeezy-squeakers,
by the fistful,

the whole beach bright with them,
chirping and churning,
rolling yellow-bellied
under breaking waves.

The ducks weren’t common,
but ships losing containers overboard
was.

“Quick money, easy profit,” she said,
“flea markets, car boots,”

and when I asked the obvious,
she gave me the usual
idle talk,
dock talk,
bullshit

before admitting
that of course
it wasn’t legal.

I last saw her rounding the point,
a canvas bag bumping at her heels,
tell-tale flashes of yellow
left scattered along the beach,

and a helicopter
circling above.

I stepped down from the stage with my pulse still a little too near the surface and returned to my table, where a man beside me exhaled a slow cloud of cigar smoke above his head, as though he had been keeping a small weather system for my arrival.

A Six Sentence Story for the Poetry Slam Event, including the word “Word”. ©Misky 2006-2026.

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