Whispers drift with the salty breeze. Oh, my dear.

His tender hand brushes a lock of hair

behind her ear. Just, for me, bear

it a little longer. Let’s enjoy the fireworks at eight.

A soft, hesitant smile, turned not to

him, but to the churning sea.

 

It was on her front porch that his lightless eyes see

her for the first time after it happened. I’m sorry, my dear,

he whispers in her ear after he kisses her, his voice too

smooth to be genuine. She touches her hair,

twirling it around her fingers decorated with eight

golden rings. None are from him. Sometimes it’s too much to bear.

 

Sometimes it feels like a grizzly bear

stomping on her ribcage; she can’t breathe in the sea

air when the fireworks illuminate the sky at eight

o’clock—at night, the only time he deigns to call her my dear.

They are alone on the beach when he strokes her hair,

and they finally leave, with sand in their clothes, at two.

 

Sometimes she cannot believe what her life has come to.

Her friends plead with her to not grin and bear

it, like he has told her to. She dyes her hair

blue like painted tears, blue like the restless sea.

He frowns when he sees her. Oh, my dear,

tell me what’s wrong. Does he love his wife, a woman of twenty-eight?

 

Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight—

He interrupts her before she finishes. Tell me what I can do to

help you, to fix you, my love, my dear.

Words once stuck in her throat slip from her lips. I can’t seem to bear

it anymore. She almost hopes he doesn’t see,

doesn’t hear her. But no—she hides her tears in blueblue hair.

 

She rakes her fingers through her hair,

and it’s been six months, and she ate

alone again last night, and she has not seen the sea

since the night of the technicolor fireworks, and it’s too

much sometimes, and now it feels like she laid herself bare

for nothing, and when even the moon can’t hear her, she whispers oh my dear.

 

She cuts off her hair and dyes it the color of sour cherries and dried blood in order to

convince herself that eight months, two-thirds of a year, is long enough and that the bear

in her chest will hibernate when she visits the sea and she doesn’t have to be called my dear.