I brought you the day it stormed.
My promise of a dead dolphin lured
you despite your distaste for sand,
how it found you even in winter boots.
We stared into the empty socket,
the eyeball plucked by beak or claw.
I showed you the tag, milk jug plastic red
on its fin. I wish I didn’t see this,
you said, foamy patches of salt-tinged snow
accumulating around the wetsuit skin.
And then it was so obvious.
That it would end, I mean.
Your father and me.
We examined like scientists the rows
of tic tac teeth in the mouth frozen open.
Sharp, you said.
But so small, I said.
Sunburn, you pointed
to the dolphin’s belly, raspberry red,
a missed observation from the day before,
or perhaps the evolution of decay.
I looked up, impossibly high up,
to see where it originated.
There was no sun for sunburn.
There was no neat hole
from which the feathers fell.
There is no place where we start
or end, except maybe here
in a snowstorm on the sand
beside a dead dolphin.
What are you looking at?
you asked, the snow clinging
to your lashes, the sea behind
you fading into the swirling white.
—
Christine is a poet, fiction writer, mother of three, and domestic violence attorney. Originally from Michigan and Ohio, she now calls Boston, MA home. She is an MFA candidate at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in Post Road Magazine and Solstice Literary Magazine, where she was selected as a finalist in the 2023 Annual Literary Contest.
