Poems
ovate
I feel betrayed to learn that the periwinkle, ever-present staple of my young New England shores, is invasive, arriving from Europe likely in the Gulf of St. Lawrence nearly two hundred years ago. But I am oversensitive to betrayal, and particularly to the kind where you think you know the facts but don't, really, know much at all. Or not the most important parts, like the why. As I trace around your belly button I'm reminded that periwinkles don't have an umbilicus, being wound so tightly around their columella there's no gap to mark the center of their own creation. It's established that the man-snail tracks down the woman by following her mucus trail across the surface of the rock, but also, we all do this, and maybe one, or maybe twenty, fertilize her eggs. What's not understood is why saxatilis are viviparous, giving birth to fully-formed kid winkles, but the eggs of littorea drop to the muddy floor to hatch outside the womb, a variation new to evolution but long before any visit to America. You say it's the seven-toothed rows of your radula that should make me most wary, but it's not. It's the way the whorl of your ovate shell parts to an opening that from one angle seems closed, and linear, but from another, perfectly round.
George W. Shuster, Jr. is a lifelong Rhode Island Episcopalian and a lineal descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the first woman poet of colonial America. He studied poetry at Columbia and the University of Virginia, and he is publisher and editor of Prudence Dispatch, a poetry journal. By trade, he is a corporate finance and restructuring lawyer.