Kristin Robertson

Mullet Toss

“GULF COAST’S GREATEST BEACH PARTY”

Nightfall and Matt tries to make it back
to the RV, slows up when sand turns
to gravel, and slumps onto the beer cooler
he’s been dragging like an adolescent pit bull.

As fishing-line-tethered toy sharks circle
his Panama hat, Uncle Jim, says, Yeah, you’re
done. The tumor that’ll kill him in six
months already glimmers inside his bile duct,

like one in thousands of stars above the ocean
and this handful of men of a certain age,
wandering somewhere between legendary
beach party and the parking lot. Hours

ago they paid fifteen bucks to underhand pitch
dead fish over the state line, Alabama to
Florida, to applause, to the winners’ bracket
for a ray-finned trophy. But now, as crowds

scatter and strung-up light bulbs dim one
by one with each round of a corner, they hear
the whirr of the if-only seawater again, this
intertidal zone, and the guys wade there awhile.

But soon bikini-clad girls breeze in, including
Miss Mullet Toss herself, and the cooler opens
to make one more go of it, Matt on his feet,
and no one is sixty or forty or twenty.

With the end of the light, and then the end
of even that light, no one is drunk or stumbling,
lost or sunburned, beautiful or sick. No one
worries if morning will come. Or in what state.

---

Kristin Robertson is the author of Surgical Wing (Alice James Books, 2017). Her poetry appears recently or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. She is the winner of the inaugural Laux/Millar Raleigh Review Poetry Prize.