Photo by Hannah Stone
Cape May, NJ
Some things we understand before we’ve ever touched them. I swallowed a poppyseed and saw you in my dreams. Summer sweltered. Sweat marked round my ribs, beating with two hearts. Boiled eggs, sharp chives, mayo, cayenne, dill, salt. Summer of salt: we retreat to the seaside of my childhood, rocky and full of my mother’s egg salad.
Time contracts and then flattens, miasmic and strange. Horseshoe crabs spawn at dawn and dusk. In-between, sandpipers and red knots eat their eggs. This is how we keep time. You and I walk the shore turning the horseshoe crabs right-side-up. To never be alone: Outlandish, outstanding. Okay, okay, now shush. I practice how I will speak to you by speaking to you. You don’t say anything back but your foot rests against my ribs, your hand beside my spine.
I become a house lived-in. Living in my mother’s house, again, it’s easy to drift into the past. Blue bottle light, dust motes, a silver rattle. The sound of it: butterfly wings. I am tender towards everything. Everything is a child and I am everything’s mother. The spider beneath the stairs is the many-times-great-granddaughter of the spider of my childhood. Weaving through years, and who’s to say she doesn’t remember? You have been within me my entire life, and who’s to say you don’t remember? It was your life, too.
Little to do in the nights but wait. But wait some more, I am not yet ready to be parted. In that long night, we go to the ocean and swim with four arms, four legs. Red kelp, smoothed shells, briny aftertaste. To share a body: Outlandish, outstanding. All our toes curl in the cold. In the moonlight, the horseshoe crabs wait belly-up for our hands.
Okay, okay, we’re here.
First line is from “Cyanotype with linoleum block print” by the poet Jennifer Valdies
Evelyn Maguire is a writer living in Cape May, NJ. Her work has been featured in Salamander, North American Review, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of the literary magazine and press Overheard.
