by Beth Weinstock
In this case, my daughter and I
had no other way down but the shovel, the digging alone
and the wind-battered craving of color.
All that mattered on the lake’s shore
were the plastic bucket and the squinting for beach glass—
all that we sifted, held up
into the morning’s late light
were the beveled blue remains of bottles, speckled rocks, scraps of trash.
Next month she’ll turn thirteen,
and we’ll return home to wait inside,
to frame the V of fugitive geese into our frosted windows.
Come December under the slate of snow
we’ll dream of wobbling, of grey stones
licked smooth by freshwater tongues,and we’ll roll the brack
of that summer to the back of our mouths;
we’ll remember when we stood
on Lake Erie while a virus painted white circles on the grass
to keep the people apart. Nothing
was more uneasy than an emptied beach
and our bare feet in dug-out holes. Where she stood as thin
and unadorned as the winter sapling
that yearns for more sun.We were advised
to cover our mouths, trusted to twist our fingers like keys
into the earth and the closer my daughter came
to the secrets inside, the more the sand salivated
for the bronze body of her youth. The more it kept forcing itself
upon her. We’ll understand by winter,
won’t we, that this is the way people think,
when the excavation of earth and the rules for assembling
have changed.Someday I’ll show her
the picture I took, the curls splashing
from her bun around her stone-shaped face, her twelve-year body tanned,
her sandy feet entirely bound
by the craters we dug. The clouds
then as now unleashed like indignant animals and the sharp
green glass of that emptied beach.
Beth Weinstock is a physician and poet in Columbus, Ohio. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She currently practices medicine part-time, and teaches poetry to veterans, medical students, and at the Franklin County Correctional Institution. She has published previously in South Florida Poetry Journal, Headline Poetry and Press, and Harpur Palate. Varada J.M is a 9th-grader based in Kerala’s Koyilandi, studying at Rani Public School, Vadakara. After hurriedly doing homework, Varada divides her time between practicing classical dance and watching horror films. She loves dogs but nobody at home wants one.
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