I keep coming back to the shoreline in my writing—not because it’s pretty, but because it’s honest. The sea doesn’t give closure. It gives weather and erosion. It gives back what it feels like giving back, and it never returns things in the shape you lost them.
These three poems sit in that space. A woman steps out of the ocean and keeps walking. A face becomes harder to hold in the mind. A few objects wash up and refuse to disappear. Together, they’re about longing, memory, and the quiet way we keep moving anyway.
Salt-Stung
Salt-stung and half-forgotten,
she rises from the sea
with sand under her nails,
hair slicked to her neck.
From a hollow depth
the ocean calls her name,
whispering her back
to where the kelp wood sings.
But her eyes are fixed on the horizon.
She does not turn.
She keeps walking up the shore
to find ground that holds.
There’s something tender in her refusal—not as a dramatic victory, but as a choice for steadiness. The ocean can call all it wants. She still puts one foot in front of the other.
A Half-Remembered Dream
The lines of your face
blur by the day.
I can’t recall
the shape of your hand.
You move through shadow,
through ink-dark seas.
Clouds erase the stars—
even north abandons me.
You linger
at the edge of the map,
where the paper thins,
where names fall off—
a thought gone missing,
a half-remembered dream.
Grief does this: it unmaps you. It makes you doubt your own compass. You can still feel the person’s weight in the world, but the details won’t hold. The mind keeps reaching, and the shoreline keeps shifting.
Things the Tide Refuses to Keep
An old message in a bottle
resting on the shore—
the letters on the note
bleached by salt.
A shard of glass,
smoothed by years,
made into a stone.
A picture frame
tangled in seaweed.
A charm from a bracelet
lost in the current,
a birthday gift
from a love long gone.
These are the things
the tide refuses to keep.
The last poem doesn’t chase the past—it just names what’s left. As if loss has its own small museum. As if the sea can take almost everything, but not the fact that something once existed.
If you’d like to share: is there a place you return to—sea, river, forest, street—that feels like it remembers you? A place that holds a version of your life, even after you’ve moved on?
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