At night, the dead lovers of the living wade out of the sea
and build small fires along the break. They shed their heavy
coats, empty their pockets of debris. They know they have lost
something—but can’t say what. The fires falter in the wind.
Their faces flicker like paper lanterns. They never speak, only
warm their hands. When the tide finally rises, extinguish-
ing their fires, the current calls them back again. Pulling on
their coats, they file into the waves. And somewhere—in a
room the shade of deep water—the living lover of the last to
disappear, wakes weeping from a dream he can’t remember.
contributor
contributor
Michael Shewmaker is the author of Penumbra (2017), winner of the 2016 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Born in Texarkana, Texas, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His recent poems appear in Best American Poetry, Image, Missouri Review, Narrative, Oxford American, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Emily.
