N. Ayara Stein
Sea Salt
Another day of keeping water company, we watch mimosa molt its paradise flowers like chicks shedding their baby fluff. The soft beat of dusty, sandaled surfers mixes with the odd music of sago palms on shores where 8,000 waves break a day, and there is one of you and one of me. It’s time to do an inventory of our lives. Our faces scare off small white birds with their crescendos of violent song. It’s wrong, I think, for me to lie in sun flat on my back and angry when I’ve done nothing. And you, your moist genius imprints itself upon the dry pages of your journal, recording the moon, the tides, and the sea pressed in its heavy animal sadness. What is it holds our arms at our sides instead of reaching out to each other? We lie here with loose arms over wet sand, and sit with the thick need to converse. We breathe deep like those who have been rescued and believe that if we are not a part of the world, it cannot abandon us. The truth is the world will rise up. The world will consume us.
N. Ayara Stein is a Romani-American and the former editor of the arts quarterly Gypsy Blood Review. She’s published in The New Orleans Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Oxford American, California Quarterly, and others.
