Mallards On The Washington Channel
twice a day, the river sprays surge through the gates of Inlet Bridge
winter mornings attend the drakes dabbling ducks, green heads, sail through the drink pluck snails and slugs caught in the shoreline grass
afternoons and late thrusting tide swings wide the gate flows into the Channel,
sends the mallard flight into the air under the gulls that sweep the gray December sky.
Andrea Wyatt’s books include Three Rooms (Oyez), Poems of the Morning, Poems of the Storm (Oyez), Founding Fathers: Book One (Llanfair), The Movies (Jawbone), Jurassic Night (White Dot), and Baseball Nights (Renaissance). She coedited Selected Poems by Larry Eigner (Oyez), Collected Poems by Max Douglas (White Dot), and The Brooklyn Reader (Random House). Wyatt works for the National Park Service in the maintenance division and is working on her first volume of short stories.