Paper Moon
We walk the paper road
between the village
and the sea lit by moonlight.
The oysters are busy opening
and closing, blinking
brine in the moonlight.
Our love just as busy –
with our fingers laced
loosely together, we walk barefoot
in the sand unwinding
from the day’s demands –
all the compromised desires.
Watching for seal noses and shark fins
just beyond the waves,
we stop and settle our bones
into the sand. Our arms linked,
we lean into one another sagging
a bit like an abandoned battlement.
The salt breeze sticks
my blowing hair to my lips
and you kiss me through
those strands, taut and vibrating
like a guitar chord
struck. We are the waves
crashing, we are the castle walls
breached, we are both the seal
and the shark stranded there
together on the moonlit beach.
Murmuration
When you murmur
your dreams
in my ear, they sound of the sea
and tingle
like a murmuration
of starling swooping and gliding
across my skin.
Our future flashes
like silver tarpon scales
shimmer in the sun
as they leap from the water
and I toss a pinch of salt
against loss.
In the Saudi desert
a sandstone structure
emerges
resembling the skeletal
scraps of a boney
fish.
All full of extinct mega-
monster wonder of
scale and bone,
dreamers exclaimed
that the sand shifted to water
and stone to flesh
in the shimmering heat haze
and the mega-fish
found the sea
once more.
Your lips come to roost
at the nape of my neck
and I lean into the comfort
of your arms
as you murmur us
into a legend
daring to carve hope
out of stone.
Erika Saunders is the author of Hit or Miss Yields (South Dakota Poetry Society, 2022) and Limes and Compromise (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Much of her work is inspired by nature and exploring human relationships as they map across the landscape. Her poetry has been included in Cholla Needles, Watershed, The Red Wheelbarrow, Noble Gas Quarterly, Pasque Petals, Prairie Winds, Split Rock Review, South Dakota Magazine and Oakwood Literary Magazine. She resides in South Dakota.
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