The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Whichever Way the Moon by Mary Ann Honaker

---

Low Tide

A poem is stuck in my throat.

Yesterday I walked at low tide,
saw the seafloor undressed:
bits of broken bottle in olive and sheer,
deserted crab, clam, and razor shells,
abandoned by soft living flesh,
leaving only husks.
Several fused together in the mud,
a damp opalescent emptiness.

A poem is caught in my fingertips.

Once when the sea lifted her shimmering skirts
the sloop of the sun was sailing
ashore in clouds and the mud glowed
lavender, orange, fleshy pink.
I said to my lover, find your phone,
but he said, in a moment this will be gone,
he said, the camera can’t capture it anyway,
so we sat on the porch and drank wine
while the colors shifted and faded.
I’ve never seen its like again.

A poem has clogged up my pen.

If you live long by the sea
you’ll grow to love the low tide
odor of rot and faint tinge of feces
overlaid with salt. If by the docks,
the smell of displaced fish,
their slow death when netted
and lifted from the brine.
If you live by the sea a long time,
so they say. I’m merely at the hinge of years
where now I do not mind.

A poem is coaxed onto the page

and perhaps now the sea will swell in,
fill in the wells where the small lives struggle,
release them again into the cool dark depths.