Bounty I thought he was a sailor though I never saw him ever leave the shore. But other men who looked like him went out to sea, caught fish, didn’t hang out at the bar. My mother never said a thing about him in my presence. He could have been an astronaut for all I heard from her. And he, those few times when he made an attempt to see me, never told me how he made his living. I didn’t know then that there were people who didn’t have a living to make. So I kept on believing he was a sailor because, being young, I needed all the beliefs I could get. And he once gave me a shell he’d picked up from the beach. That was as near as he got to salt water, as near as bringing bounty home to me.
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Juanita Rey is a poet from the Dominican Republic, residing in the USA. She has been published in magazines such as Pennsylvania English, Petrichor Machine, Pinyon and online at sites such as 2 River Review and Madcap Poets.
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