Poetry

August 24th, 2025

Evan Tungate
barrier islands; or, mating habits; or, birds

Anhingas aren’t waterproof, you said, so after they dive for their dinner they dry off by posing like this. And you spread your arms bent kilter at the elbows and stretched your neck head cocked slightly and held it for a moment pale skin at tanline’s end bead of mangrove sweat fixed me with a single birdish eye. Don’t laugh, you said. I’m actually quite vulnerable like this. Unable to fly. I could never be an anhinga anyways. They mate for life.

If you don’t move hardly at all, you said, you can hear the crabs crawling on the mangrove roots. And we held our boards together and it was true and we sat listening to their mechanism tick and the wingbeat green heron stilting stick-legged slow unrippled and you too hunting. The heron struck crabs scattered like rain except for one wriggling beakpinned my hand under yours and I could be a heron, maybe, you said. Seasonally monogamous.

Migrating cormorants have site fidelity, you said, each word cut crystal. Always returning to the same nest. Black broad wings kettled up up over us and the sound dragged on entangled in crosscountry cryptochrome yearning. Imagine only ever going to the same place, you said, over and over again, and you shuddered. I could never be a cormorant. When I said that sounded nice you looked away. Did you never feel that magnet pull?

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Evan Tungate is a better poet than most engineers and a better engineer than most poets. He writes poetry and short fiction about moments. He finds long-form writing intimidating, but he’s working on getting over it. He is a member of the Duluth Failed Poets Society, and his work has previously appeared in the University of Minnesota’s undergraduate literary magazine, The Tower.