Diana Khoi Nguyen

It will be windy for a while until it isn’t. The waves will shoal. A red-legged cormorant will trace her double along glassy water, forgetting they are hungry. The sea will play this motif over and over, but there will be no preparing for it otherwise. Water will quiver in driftwood. Sound preceding absence, a white dog trailing a smaller one: ghost and noon shadow, two motes disappearing into surf. And when the low tide comes lapping and clear, the curled fronds of seaweed will furl and splay, their algal sisters brushing strands against sands where littleneck clams feed underwater. Light rain will fall and one cannot help but lean into the uncertainty of the sea. Bow: a knot of two loops, two loose ends, our bodies on either side of this shore where we will dip our hands to feel what can’t be seen. Horseshoe crabs whose blue blood rich in copper will reach for cover, hinged between clouds and sea. It will never be enough, the bull kelp like a whip coiling in tender hands, hands who know to take or be taken, but take nothing with them: I will marry you. I will marry you. So we can owe what we own to every beautiful thing.

A husband puts an afghan over the dead goat’s torso, combs the knots out of  her beard. The goat smells chalk, wonders when the riders will come in their wool pakols red from walnuts, spurs chirring like castanets. The buzkashi whips will grow damp in their mouths, their rope belts slowly twisting in place. She knows not to be devoured is a perfect sentiment because she has thoughts to gather, faces to grow, hunger this morning and no throat, only the song in her teeth that goes on indefinitely as he saws off each hoof, just above the ankle, her knees bent for praying. Her head is axed. Her collar falls to the ground, its circle unbroken. She looks to see how deep is the pool of  blood is a river of  no one becoming her. With salt in her heart she’ll stay good for days. He’s been to her like her father he killed. He’s been to her like the father he killed. He turns her face to the window: mountains oddly still in the milk broth of oblivion. Intercourse: the sun drove a man in the ground like a stake.