The shower of their first-floor duplex sputters
cold and salty. Biloxi’s winter now scallops
the young wife’s body, and she asks her husband
to fix the temperature. She’s been in the gulf and needs
to wash off the silty morning, needs heat to latch.
Sunrise the color of pumpkins; a colic, a basin,
an imposition between them. She swims
each morning, far and far and far. But she returns to shower.
She cannot go beyond the waist-deep water, the semaphores,
the permanent distance.

Originally appeared in The Error of Nostalgia