Issue 44.1 Summer/Fall 2023

I Need to Believe that Seagulls Know They Are Creating Memories

Seagulls

You are dying, slowly, dementia rotting your body,

putting holes in your brain. You mean the ocean to me.

 

Mornings smelling of salt air and crustaceans. Our days

at the beach. The way your disease has made me

 

mother. My grief falls like satiated seagulls dropping

fish bones and empty shells. They sink into sand,

 

shifting the weight of the shore as they dissolve,

making new beach. Ours was white and purple, and we

 

could send some flying just by shaking out beach towels,

surprising our eyes with the onslaught,

 

clogging tear ducts. Once home, we’d scrub off

the flecks of once-living beings from our sunburned skin.

 

Salt-stung but happy. Now, I drive to the ocean but stay

in the car, as weakened by grief as a surface wave

 

in shallow water. I roll down the windows, hear the gulls,

watch as they coast on breezes. Their appetites help

 

make the sand, its colors memorials to the sea creatures

that once were: oysters, crabs, clams. You no longer

 

remember this place, but my memories stays here, gull loud

and as cragged as salt water skin covered in sand.

 

 

Photo by https://unsplash.com/@frankiefoto?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referr…"