by Tin Fogdall

We sat upstairs while they slipped her into a bag.
On the desk, in a photograph album,
she kept walking into the ocean,
holding her sister’s hand.
Sun dribbled down between javelin firs.
A small amount of other people’s ashes
get mixed in. Your signature
means you understand.
Without her body, she was washing away.
Memory is a strange Bell— I can’t
make it ring. The phoebes are coming back,
their ridiculous, wagging tails
a balm. Blown limbs
beside the trail. I can’t haul back up
how she touched or smelled
there is no hemisphere where she registers,
but when I sing,
it’s her voice.
She was mostly oxygen, sixty percent
breath. For one hundred mornings,
I’ve stood at the mirror
—it’s not me there but the light
I keep shedding. By this time,
she has fallen
somewhere as rain.

Note: The italicized line is by Emily Dickinson.

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Tin Fogdall’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Reivew, The Threepenny Review, Poetry, Slate, Green Mountains Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other venues. She earned her M.A. in creative writing from Boston University and lives now in Vermont. On Instagram, she documents a minor obsession with circles.