At the beach and nearly 40 I lay, stretched out, eyes bleached
from the overcast sky. The kind of biting light that doesn’t
know when to give—coloring the mood with its tin breath.
As a child, I would cloud gaze, viewing all possibilities from
above: my future home, the boat I would never own,
a family anchored in a cloak of purity. My body—a revolver
launching cartwheels off diving boards, the blasé hand of
youth flipping the bird to my future self with joints firmly intact.
But today the sky exudes a somber glow, as if saying, I am tired.
Clouds pull like a swath of torn linens; and although I lather
my aging skin with the highest level of SPF, it merely glints
like an apparition. I turn on my stomach and sink into a bed
of tight sand, heartbeat caught in the tunnel of my throat—
the closest thing to a landing strip I have.
