You knew how to make nothing of your leaving:
your brother’s baseball glove grease slicked on the hinges,
how to shape your bed to look like your curled body, slipping
out onto the small stage of night. You said you’d meet him,
the tide was low, and he was waiting for you
with a bottle of vodka.
This was the summer you took to running and wheezed
your way to the edge of town stopped-stark by the bay,
the ocean, the interstate. He told you things you already knew
about the stars, how the light was old,
and you cooed in surprise anyway; the bottle stuck
in the sand between you, as quiet as a chess piece.
Your hips were new so you gave yourself a new name,
said you were born somewhere else, smiled, lied
about your age, lied about––
When you wake it’s morning. Alone and half
in the tide, your panties rough with a handful
of sand. Salt crusting your eyelashes shut, your hair is the same
color as the shoreline. With one purpled wrist, there is a hollow
ache in you, like something’s
gone. As you rise, the seagulls startle, shocked by your living.
Wings springing away from the driftwood. This morning
is strung together. You stumble home. And it’s different
after that. And by that I mean, it’s no longer a lie to say yes
when your father asks if you remember that one time
when a tiger shark washed ashore. How it was stiff on the sand
and everyone stood in a circle around it. How you,
three years old, slinked through the crowd, toddled over
to the dead thing, kissed it on its nose.
