This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print Edition

When the storm was just a swirling argument
my father swept the shore each day

for sea glass
to exchange for quarters

The teacher came to collect him
in the hallway by the vending machines
where geckos did not fall from slick cinder walls

Years ago
wind and water funneled missed Saigon
into silt romance
to settle on a strip of land
off
south Jersey

so when it landed on soft dunes and stilts
it carried our young out to sea

When waking one morning in a strange town
do not think to become the

boat people

of some midtown transatlantic
strip mall

I do not claim to know disaster
that delivered my father as his own cargo

In the embroidery of my
diner napkin memory
I see just our simple golden bodies

and evening summer haze

which in Sea Bright
would have blurred the lighthouse

the burmese python
wound tight around the backyard palm

spilling like white froth to the ground
following a boy’s finger

to beyond the property’s edge