I just make out the buoy and the boy who
reaches it, a blond spot at the red
uncapsizeable hat, gone
past the continent’s ledge.
He waves. The sea waves too, advances
on a crab’s sand-hole hermitage:
inside, it’s rimmed with falling
sand grains like stars. The sea foams,
winks closer. I eye the crab’s house.
Will he escape, pincers bobbing,
open like mouths? I pose
the question while my father,
back to the sea, snaps photos.
I am the sea’s corsage, a pink
and brown girl, pinned
by unstinting sunlight
to a towel, to the sand.
Sun-burned, hot, I stand.
If you look through me you see
my brother’s head bobbing
on the sea’s wink and blink.
He emerges, buoyant, beaded, starred.
I am envy’s crabbed sister,
my horizon, sand’s old glitter.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 16, Issue 3.
Mary Moore has work in Birmingham Poetry Review, Unsplendid, and Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Negative Capability and more. Her first collection, The Book of Snow, was published by Cleveland State University in 1997.
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