J.D Clapp
(Also featured in Revolution John)

Garvey slept on the rancid floor five nights a week

Smelling of dead fish and sea bird guano

“Like a Tijuana whore house,” he’d say laughing

And he knew too.

Garvey tended the submerged rebar netted pens

Filled with live sardines and anchovies

He sold by the scoop to all the local fisherman

Heading out to the banks or down south to Mexico.

At night Garvey sprayed the sealion shit from the deck

With a high-pressure saltwater hose in third-hand rubber

Boots and bibs, a grit hanging from busted lips illuminating

Cancered skin, leather sun-seasoned in rancid fish oil.

Garvey sipped vodka by day from a faded Smart Water bottle,

And drank the beers fisherman on half-million-dollar boats tossed him

At night while he smoked Camels and weed 

From a little glass pipe that looked like a purple cock.

Garvey shot a bull sea loin that destroyed his pens to

Eat his bait, with a crossbow he got in a swap with

A pinhead deck hand in exchange for an

Eightball of shitty meth and old Penn lever drag.

On Christmas night, the boats lit and twinkling

The sea lion Garvey shot swam into the main pen and 

Died with a crossbow bolt sticking 

Out of its eye pointing up to Orion.

And when the fisherman called the Harbor Patrol

On Boxing Day to report a body floating in the bait pen

Next to a dead sea lion with an arrow it’s eye

Nobody knew who to call or gave much of a shit.

JD Clapp is based in San Diego, CA. His poems have appeared in PovertyHouse, Revolution John, Fictionette, Maya’s Micros/The Closed Eye Opened, and the Remembering Charles Bukowski Anthology (Moonstone, 2023).