Oracle - The Brewton-Parker College Review

Hannah’s Collection
Mitch McClure

For Hannah’s eighth birthday, her aunt has collected
seashells from Key West, Sanibel Island, St. Augustine,
and the Golden lsles of Georgia -- every pristine,
magical realm within her reach.
Carefully labeled, dated, and referenced,
accompanied by meticulous documentation and illustration,
the shells are nestled in grottoes
of numbered nut and bolt drawers
and assorted Tupperware containers
transformed into shrines. There are conchs and lettered olives,
turbans, tulips, and jewel boxes,
moonshells and baby’s ears, a hundred
miraculous signs. Bodies once encrusted
in mud, wrapped in dull shrouds
of fibrous periostracum, have been resurrected into these hard,
gleaming skins the color of incense. Even the skeletal,
rubbery egg casing of a whelk
articulates gracefully across the fingertips,
like a rosary. By counting and naming
the bones of the ocean, every starfish and shark’s tooth
and tiny pale limpet, by counting and naming
these, her gifts, may Hannah learn
the particular wonder of each, and hear,
undiminished by the roaring of her own heart,
the endless prayer of the sea.

Rebecca Timberlake