It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
A wave slides slantways under surfers, skinny teenage hips kicked out as they fall in water that swirls like mercury, and the kids shrieking in the shallows, and the tankers still as the corpses of giants along the horizon line, and the pier rough-tumbling out to its conclusion. Small boys: kick water at one other. Old people: sit on the bench. Observe. Skinny girls: selfie, selfie, text. My baby, not a baby anymore, tugs my shirt aside anyway, nurses. The surfers falling and falling. The first-grader’s current joke: Why do seagulls fly over the sea? Because, if they flew over the bay they’d be bagels! Bend the knees, bend the knees, swivel-twist, fall back, fall back, fall. A teen with boy-band bleached hair smokes beneath the pier. You’ve been at sea for some time now. You’ve been sick of it. But then, the roar of the waves calms you too. The kids are doing handstands at the waterline like your inverted brain, sand-suck around their hands as the tide runs out, the world upside-down, then slowly righting itself.
Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and two daughters. See chloeAVmartinez.com.
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