All that summer we feared the unseen. Jaws in theaters: our canvas rafts like bait for watery monsters. We left them on the sand. Our parents drinking Bloody Marys on the beach house deck while we battled the ocean with nothing but our bodies. Over and over, we tried to swim to France. Over and over, we lost our way. Nobody noticed that we were bruised. Nobody asked why we were trying to escape. Can you see that I don’t know how to tell our story? Something was lost in the salt. Something was lost on the screen: the freckle-faced boy pulled under in a churn of blood. His mother forever changed. We learned that no one could protect us from God.  That we had to save ourselves from stingers: from teeth: from the deception of waves & light. Now I am landlocked & unable to blow wishes across the finite horizon. Searching for answers in the alchemy of nests. Still feeling the ache of what was taken. What was drowned. The mystery of the unreachable shore.

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Author’s note: On a literal level this poem is about a formative childhood experience – my brother, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, cousins, and I would go to Oak Island, NC every summer. In the context of the Crone poems I’ve been writing since turning 60, this poem is interrogating that memory. What does my 12-year old self have to teach me? What are the things that only she knows? 

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of several chapbooks including The Water Cycle (Variant Literature) and How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art. Find Beth on Twitter, Instagram, and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.