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Home / Bulletin 3 / a girl on the beach

Jul 02 2021

a girl on the beach

By Tara Isabel Zambrano

Poetry

ASP Bulletin | July 2, 2021

This poem was selected as a winner of Alan Squire Publishing's April, 2021 National Poetry Month Contest after prompts created by Rose Solari.

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As days ripened, he worked in silence - his eye 

on the weather, a daily walk with his dog, until he saw

 

a girl greeting the Pacific – her frock peculiar pink

fanned out on the sand, her face

 

moon-washed against a water-lapped sky.

Such was the freshness – he felt born quaking

 

with anticipation nudging the dog leash, flashing back 

to the smell of mothballs

 

of his grandma's mittens, the tang of garlic on his 

mother's fingertips, mouths honey-glazed of long-legged women

 

who cupped his face and left him

like a wick darkened in the aftershock of a gust

 

a prairie of hurt not letting him confess that he’d always 

need a woman to rein him in, to help him grow old.

 

And watch him die on a quiet summer evening.

As days ripened, he worked in silence - his eye 

on the weather, a daily walk with his dog, until he saw

 

a girl greeting the Pacific – her frock peculiar pink

fanned out on the sand, her face

 

moon-washed against a water-lapped sky.

Such was the freshness – he felt born quaking

 

with anticipation nudging the dog leash, flashing back 

to the smell of mothballs

 

of his grandma's mittens, the tang of garlic on his 

mother's fingertips, mouths honey-glazed of long-legged women

 

who cupped his face and left him

like a wick darkened in the aftershock of a gust

 

a prairie of hurt not letting him confess that he’d always 

need a woman to rein him in, to help him grow old.

 

And watch him die on a quiet summer evening.

tara2

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Tara Isabel Zambrano is the author of Death, Desire And Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

Written by Alan Squire Publishing · Categorized: Bulletin 3

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