Salt, sand, and burns

1

The end of summer looks like sunburns, dirty laundry, and other regrets. My swimsuit sits on the floor in a damp pile of itself. Little defeated green thing. Curiosity is tired, but the desire to turn over every shell on the beach to see if something still lives inside it remains. Three days ago, I spent hours on the beach letting my body burn though I didn’t know my body was burning. I walked and walked and walked in the sand that wasn’t dry—that was always shifting—and filled my palms with shells: now empty homes with nothing inside them. 

When I returned home I found sand in my pockets, and in my bag. While unpacking, the sand spilled onto the floor; a little bit of Kamakura¹ in Tokyo. There was salt in my hair, which made it curl into tighter loops. When I returned home I was something new, kind of different. A burned, lazy version of a busy Tokyo self in decline. On video chats, everyone could see that something had changed. I tell them of the ghosts we heard in our rented apartment by the sea. How the cabinets opened on their own, and the sliding doors shook. F swears he saw a shadow in the corner of the tatami room. We squeezed our eyes shut on the second night so we couldn’t see, and held each other until we fell asleep. 

2

dress yourself in you
dip into the seams
that pull 
and hold the folds

and in the creases
fingers press

but what does that look like
velvet sequin cotton touch 
i’m like an orange taste

where in the bend
gentleness found 

licked lips
peels back
warm like orange skin
left in the sun
for a little too long 

baby burns on forearms
it isn’t love, they whisper
my strap breaks when i climb into his car
this dress is too tight
passenger seat; it’s raining when we leave 
to look for safety pins 

3

1. Kamakura 鎌倉 かまくら: a town on the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture.