We sat upstairs while they slipped her into a bag. On the desk, in a photograph album, she kept walking into the ocean, holding her sister’s hand. Sun dribbled down between javelin firs. A small amount of other people’s ashes get mixed in. Your signature means you understand. Without her body, she was washing away. Memory is a strange Bell— I can’t make it ring. The phoebes are coming back, their ridiculous, wagging tails a balm. Blown limbs beside the trail. I can’t haul back up how she touched or smelled there is no hemisphere where she registers, but when I sing, it’s her voice. She was mostly oxygen, sixty percent breath. For one hundred mornings, I’ve stood at the mirror —it’s not me there but the light I keep shedding. By this time, she has fallen somewhere as rain.
Tin Fogdall’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Reivew, The Threepenny Review, Poetry, Slate, Green Mountains Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other venues. She earned her M.A. in creative writing from Boston University and lives now in Vermont. On Instagram, she documents a minor obsession with circles.
10/4 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free
10/4 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León and local poet Susannah Winters Simpson / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free
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