Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea
Listen, love—the cliffs are tired
of restraining us, tired of the questions
we ask each other about time. But
we’ve forgotten our schedules tonight
we find the luxury in the silk pillow-
case, camisole, the petal wings of moths fluttering at the window. We lie
together in a bed of beach music
above a small village of fishermen,
of ferries and pathways.
When they lower the boats, the sea
swallows hard and we slip beneath a blue
brushstroke not knowing who will stay under
and who will make it back to shore.
—
This selection comes from Kelli Russell Agodon’s book of poetry Houseglass Museum, available from White Pine Press. Purchase your copy here!
Kelli Russell Agodon is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her most recent collection is Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014) and The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, which she coauthored with Martha Silano. Her second collection, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room was chosen by Carl Dennis for the winner of the White Pine Press Book Prize, and was also the Winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year in Poetry as well as a Finalist for the Washington State Book Prize. Her other books include Small Knots, Geography, and Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry. Kelli was born and raised in Seattle and educated at the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop where she received her MFA in creative writing. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and is a Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Retreat for Women Poets. She lives in a small seaside town where she is an avid paddleboarder, mountain biker, and hiker who has a fondness for writing letters, desserts, and fedoras. www.agodon.com.
Emily Capettini is a fiction writer originally from Batavia, IL. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and her fiction has appeared in places like Noctua Review and Stirring: A Literary Collection. Her critical work can be found in Feminisms in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose (McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012) and is upcoming in Neil Gaiman in the Twenty-First Century(McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015). She currently lives in Maryland.
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