i. Sand Castles

The sailboats are black
triangles stencilled on orange
construction paper sunsets.

You are hidden beneath
the horizon, sediment between
the bones of drowned whales.

I am on the shore
with the other children,
who are with their fathers,
building sand castles.

But because you are not here,
my castle is shoddily made,
fragile towers already collapsing.

My mother offers me
a consolation of baroque shells,
but crumbling walls have no use
for decoration.

I scatter them over the waves
like ashes.

ii. Storms

Storms descend
with the sudden ferocity of
matron's hands
shaking a bedsheet,
sending the ships, bits of grime,
flying.

Afterward, who would suspect,
underneath the freshly pressed surface,
such devastation.

iii. Shipwrecks

I scour this parchment of beach
for a message from you, ciphered
in the cryptic scrawling of driftwood and
ink-stains of kelp, punctuated by pebbles,
smudged unreadable by the tides.

The wind polishes the bones of forgotten
shipwrecks, echoing bedtime stories
you once told me of a castaway naked
on an uncharted island, stalked by cannibals, or
a pirate captain with a peg leg and a parrot,
plotting mutiny, overheard in an apple barrel, or
perhaps, clinging to a fig tree,
a father searching for a way back home.

I give you a silver beard, maybe a glass
eye for authenticity, vellum
skin riddled with scars like X’s
on a treasure map, and a voice
parched as memory, whispering,

things lost at sea wash ashore eventually.