Sugar Tide ~ poetry by Samantha Moe

The heart is coated in ribbons and bells, I guess this was always how things would go, crouched in the sandcastle made of hands, you in your mother’s faded Cape Cod sweatshirt and me in your pants, this feeling is an error, half of the day is swallowed by caverns, I have to reteach my hand to draw rabbits, L. you are here with your map and glitter nails, this way out of the sea town, it’s even worse than I thought, you laugh at my jokes and my stomach turns into a soft pink snow-cone house, the smoke alarm in the kitchen is going off again and the mothers are all cackling, we can hear them over the incoming waves, they don’t know how to turn it off so they shatter the plastic with a hammer, things are hysterical, the sea is ribeye-red and the seals hang out before low tide, damn if this isn’t risk, a hazard, a hoping ache to see the sharks together, what do you call euphoria you can’t share, why are you in all my diaries, you’re air-drying your hair on a rock and I’m trying to think of a clever way to entertain you, like what if my nail beds had forks, is it hard to tuck mice into matchbox beds, do you want jolly rancher eggs, should we talk about what happened, no, let’s hide my look in a hole, we will bury the memory and when they excavate my mind there will be Mary statues, an octopus wall, a very bored looking girl selling buckets of candy, answer my riddles three, my father’s forehead is visible just beyond the rock face, you hate to find a way out, you want to see more of my mother but she becomes a pink hair dryer screaming a name I can’t stop thinking about, little lilacs on my grandfather’s head, talk all that talk but don’t leave the beach, later the mothers will tell us stories over dinner, we’ll take photos in the ivy, I’m trying not to become hysterical but the urge to grab your arm and talk about the atrium, and oh god your mother is witnessing me, let’s make no promises, let’s dance into kernels of sand.

Sam Moe is the recipient of a 2023 St. Joe Community Foundation Poetry Fellowship from Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Whale Road Review, The Indianapolis Review, Sundog Lit, and others. Her poetry book Heart Weeds is out from Alien Buddha Press (Sept. ’22) and her chapbook Grief Birds is out from Bullshit Lit (Apr. ’23). Her full-length Cicatrizing the Daughters is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.