The beach is sinking.
It’s a sigh. It’s the lack of you and I, pulling like the tide
against its warm face.
The beach has become the way we say tomorrow and soon and
I’m forgetting your name.
*
The beach was waiting for us that night, when you rolled the thickest joints
I’d ever seen, our lungs a funhouse the minute you said keep going in the dark.
You said drugs in our thirties is a reward for making it this far and
the sand’s lips curled in agreement as our feet sank
in the warm pleasure.
We drank long and hard. We believed one another’s limbs to be daybreak.
We became hours of misplacement and hormones and
quick fucks and long fucks and
fucking in the saltwater pool with its unnatural, ethereal glow below the surface,
a siren’s call.
That whole time, the beach was sleeping and forgetting how to wake again.
*
Next year I may not remember your name. Or at least, the way it felt to
say it when your mouth swallowed whole constellations of me.
Next year the beach will keep sinking, falling, eroding into the
treacherous bite of the shore – that final enticement, calling from horizon.
The waters, our bodies, we clap against ourselves in want, sand stuck to our bronzing skin.
Yes, the beach
will become the parts of us we cannot hold onto for fear of wanting them
all over again.
The beach itself forgets. We become our memories,
sinking into the night.
Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and resident of New York City, but spent much of his youth in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania (an early ecological inspiration for his work). As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, Brennan hopes to capture and juxtapose the vastness we experience within our rapidly changing natural world with the often daunting intimacies the queer body presents. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, The Garfield Lake Review, ONE ART, and Feral: a Journal of Poetry & Art, among others. Instagram/Twitter @dannyjbrennan
