“Red Ladder at Night” by Mary Dean Lee
I walk on the beach in blackness, no moon, and it helps me when I can’t sleep, when I can’t figure how to stop catastrophe. I know where to step along the smooth flat surface, follow the water’s edge, splash of small waves, heading north to where the sea feeds into the saltmarsh. Along the way I like climbing up a tall, red wooden ladder to a chair, lifeguard station, for surveying swimmers in trouble, out too far when the tide shifts, currents and undertow clash and buffet the contents of the sea in regular, normal turbulence.
After the hurricane that didn’t hit land or flood roads, just hammered the beach, nothing is the same. Like a tornado, it sucked up everything—dunes, flip-flops, jellyfish, sea oats, conch shells, beach chairs, pelicans, gulls, shovels, crab claws—roiling it all into a spout, then spitting it out again, random landings. No flat surfaces, bumpy rows of ripples with deep tire treads, hills and valleys of sand, gulleys and craters of trapped water from high tides. Waves empty into sloughs and swales that interrupt the path along the sea’s edge toward the marsh. Dead of night when I can’t sleep, I want to walk the beach but my feet don’t know the way, red ladder nowhere, rungs still circling.
Artist Statement
I write poems to discover and express, to unravel and undress. To taste, and let my tongue linger a little longer. I am drawn to poke around, stir up, tease apart, fiddle with things that clash, jar, and jangle. I like putting words together to capture an intense emotion, insight, a moment of joy, despair, or confusion on seeing, hearing, embracing life's beat and bounce. My thrill is a quiet place outside my window, underneath the redbud towering over the fading forsythia.
Mary Dean Lee’s debut collection Tidal was published April 2024 by Pine Row Press and was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation A. M. Klein Poetry Prize. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hamilton Stone Review, MicroLit, Dunes Review, Burningword, Free State Review, The Write Launch. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, studied theatre and literature at Duke University and Eckerd College, and received her PhD in organizational behavior at Yale before moving to Montreal to teach at McGill University. debut collection Tidal was published April 2024 by Pine Row Press and was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation A. M. Klein Poetry Prize. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hamilton Stone Review, MicroLit, Dunes Review, Burningword, Free State Review, The Write Launch. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, studied theatre and literature at Duke University and Eckerd College, and received her PhD in organizational behavior at Yale before moving to Montreal to teach at McGill University. Website: https://marydeanlee.com