The Bay by Tessa Sagner

Which I used to assume was warm even this far up along the coast because I thought all beaches were hot; don’t you know that the world keeps existing when I stop visiting in the summer

You do too, outgrowth of a segment

like a centipede leg (one of hundreds but not thousands)

rooted in places you can never rip off except in shaggy chunks

But object permanence fails me; I forget you when a trinket falls out of a shoelace 

The third girl to drink up native strands of fog in gulps with us on park benches is now out of your life entirely

severed with a slice of baby bangs and

dropped off the face of the earth the way people do sometimes at sensitive ages where the veil is thin

But even then it was already rrcooling, condensing, hiding your eyes behind smudgy glasses and drying out your skins

So blonde and stringy, freckled in anticipation of the sun we split and not designed for the hills and skeptic spells of your homeland cast on to everybody who set foot on the rock

Without an escape route what to do? but climb into the raincoat-boat and dissolve into bitterly departed pieces 

you scatter in droplets on windshields and phone screens