Erin Fristad
After 15 years of commercial fishing, Erin Fristad finally has
a job that doesn’t require wearing rubber pants or crossing the Columbia River
bar in January. She now works as Goddard College’s Port Townsend liaison,
employed by the same college at which she earned her MFA. Erin teaches poetry
and creative writing in a surprising range of venues. Her poems are published or
forthcoming in journals and anthologies including americas review, The Blue
Collar Review, Hanging Loose, Mute Note Earthward: a Washington Poets
Association Anthology, Periphery 2004, Raven Chronicles, Rosebud, Seattle
Review, and Stringtown.
Three Poems by Erin Fristad
Advice to Female Deckhands
You will be the cook.
In addition to wheel watches, working
on deck, unloading fish, fueling up,
filling fresh water, mending nets,
grocery shopping whenever you come to town,
you also will prepare three meals a day
and two hearty snacks to go with coffee.
You must keep the kettle on the stove full
and the juice jug and two gallons of milk in the fridge.
You will learn to slice vegetables, prepare a marinade,
cook pasta, and fillet a salmon
in twenty-minute intervals
while the net is out. You will learn
to ignore the other crew members sitting
at the galley table reading. You must know
how to create a corral in rough weather,
so pots of soup don’t end up dripping
down the firewall behind the stove. You will need
bungee cords to keep the cast iron skillet from sliding.
These cords melt if they touch the stove top.
Keep a squeeze container of aloe vera gel
under the galley sink for the burns
on your hands and forearms.
The stove will blow out on windy days
when you’re exhausted,
your skin stinging with jellyfish.
The crew will say they’re not hungry on these days
but when you slide behind the Cape,
it will be flat
calm and all of you will be starving. Before relighting the
stove
determine how much diesel has built up.
If it’s more than an inch deep,
turn off the fuel source
by flipping a breaker in the engine room.
You don’t have time for ear protection. Get down there
and back before someone hollers for you on deck.
Passing the engine, watch the straps on your raingear,
your ponytail, where you put your hands.
When cooking, remember all odors from the galley
drift directly into the wheelhouse. Fish sauce
smells like dirty tennis shoes. Once she smells this,
your skipper’s daughter will refuse to eat anything
she suspects has fish sauce. As a woman and cook
you will be expected to have a special bond with the skipper’s
daughter
and you will. Have art supplies in a shoe box in the galley,
a drawing tablet under a cushion, collect starfish,
decorator crab, and spiny lump suckers in a deck bucket.
Teach her what you know can kill her. When she cries
put your arm around her, kiss her
on the top of the head, and let her cry.
Allow her to use your cell phone to call friends
in exchange for making salads, pots of coffee,
washing lunch dishes, carrying groceries to the boat.
Develop sign language for communicating
when she stands in the galley door
peering out at you on deck.
This isn’t what I intended.
I set out to give you advice for taking care
of yourself, now it’s about taking care of a girl
you’re related to by circumstance.
This is exactly what will happen.
You’ll notice a hum
more penetrating than the engine.
previously published in Stringtown
In the Bedroom
. . .the signals we give—yes or no, or
maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
Evening light saturates them.
Shadows eclipse his eyes, mouth. She wants
to hear the story of him crying
over a crow he shot when he was thirteen
walking with friends along a dirt
road. She wants to hear how the bird
fell into a ditch, a ditch filled
with forget-me-nots and yellow
buttercups. She wants to hear how
it hopped in circles, unable to control
its direction. How one of the boys kicked it,
reversing the circles, sending it further
into the ditch. How finally, exhausted,
the bird fell forward gulping air
and ditch water. When it quit moving
the other boys laughed, hard,
harder until one boy kicked it again
onto the dirt road where it landed on its back.
The spongy black pads on its feet gripped air,
claws curled into themselves.
This is when her lover remembers
sobbing out of control,
one of the boys punching him
from behind, between his shoulder blades,
knocking him to his knees,
calling him Wuss, Mama’s Boy.
The other boys laughing,
walking away. She wants this story,
the silence they sit in after he tells it. She wants
to imagine her lover punched by a bully,
crying. She wants to kiss the soft skin
on his neck. She wants to see him shaking,
watching his feet, walking home alone.
previously published in Mute Note
Earthbound: a WPA Anthology
The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth
He’s high on meth, made in the back room of a blue
rambler at the edge of a clear-cut, one mile from town.
He twitches and waits, twitches and waits.
She’s stuck to a mirror in the Chevron bathroom, counting
freckles, pimples, dimples her dad loved
to pinch when he came home weekends
from the woods, smelling of fir, gas, two-stroke
oil, brush fire, campfire, three cans of Budweiser for the
drive.
While the boyfriend waits outside, she forgets she came here
to puke.
Her stomach knots, knuckles of a logger, her dad’s hand
pushing
back the recliner, watching The Price Is Right, waiting for
the foreman’s
call, waiting for work, waiting for the sound of a CB
crackling,
an engine shifting, brakes hissing louder than the door
slamming, his daughter disappearing between broken
logging trucks down a dirt road to the edge of a clear-cut.
Stuck to the mirror in the Chevron bathroom, she remembers
again, but nothing comes out, bile settles behind her teeth,
no money for gum, boyfriend in the parking lot
has cigarettes, she remembers
boyfriend in the parking lot.
He twitches and waits, twitches and waits.
previously published in Rosebud and
americas review
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