Glossy, brown, and whiskered, blubber and bark,
I left my heart with the sea lions
who fight and snuggle on their piers,
some flipper to flank looking almost like love
while alpha males galumph and butt
their rivals from their comfy berths.

Eating crab cocktail from a plastic cup, birthday
present to myself, and watching white-sailed barks
in the bay and playing tourist, I’m butted
up against a couple from Ohio.  The sea lines
up with the horizon.  I fall in love
with the ocean over and over, peerless

water.  Salty.  Vast.  The bridge piers,
orange and deco, rise from water, birthing
web, their fragile spans.  Nearby Alcatraz, lovely
in its green decay, like the pier-posts, trees de-barked
and salted gray.  A breeze directs attention left: see lines
of buildings rise the hill, house and tower close abutted.

The Ohio couple stands, hands on one another’s butts.
Once I backed against a man here to peer
at the brown mammalian mass, could see lines
crinkling by his eyes, his mind birthing
this joke: to make eyes wild and dumb, advance barking
to push me from the bed.  I laughed and almost loved

him then.  This is not a love
poem for him.  It’s for these beasties, butt
of so many tourist jokes.  Though we bark
at their ungainly land-lost appearance,
we’re as bad, thrashing in water.  Now, a ship’s berthing
wake wakes the snoozing sea lions.

All brown heads are up.  The sea lions
bob and yell distress, yet, “I would love
to lie around all day like that,” says a birthmarked
man.  Sure, lying in piles looks indolent, but,
think: propeller, shark – they cluster with peers
for safety, guard weak flippers and barked

flanks.  They must love to make us butts
of ridicule, who berth ourselves here, gawk and peer,
the sea lions hearing only gibberish as we ape their barks.

Susanna Kittredge is an office manager by day, student by night, and poet whenever she gets the chance. Her work has appeared in the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press), and the journals Parthenon West Review, Sidebrow, Big Ugly Review, and Fourteen Hills, among others. She lives and works in San Francisco.