Sandman
He was like the desert
with the heat of his touch, that touch
that burned the living, and his breath
so
unforgiving for so many,
with that white hot breath that
banished wind and rain.
But she lived and lives in the desert
so his heat didn’t singe her skin.
And his breath on her neck and his hands on her waist and the taste of
him
crashed
like the waves,
like the sea.
To her, he was a sandman made of sand,
the heat of the desert but with that
magic touch and magic song,
she’d always ask him
to sing
sandman bring me sleep and
dreams of you.
But Mr. Sandman and his magic touch and the way that her body shined brightly under the desert sun can only last so long before running out of
oxygen.
Rain
Sunlight covered by clouds, the sound
of thunder, distant, high above, like hearing the
explosions from a film playing in the room
next to yours.
The rain dampens the fire you’re used to
feeling lying next to you in bed. Too much
rain, and not enough oxygen means the fire’s going
dead.
As the fire dies, its keeper whispers
baby, I can’t bear to see you
cry.
Rain isn’t meant to do this. It’s meant to
bring things to life, not make them
die.
Make things grow, not make them
wilt.
After a while, the fire is out, and
you forget how good it felt to burn.
The Shore
The shore sounds unreal, like a dream,
like she might wake, and see the waves fade
away.
She doesn’t just hear it
she listens.
She listens to the way the waves move,
watches as they rise and fall and
crash.
She asks if they can go
down to the shore,
she says
I just want to hear it more
clearly.
Over the engine and the radio and the sound of the sat-nav and the sound of her parents, she
fights to hear the waves above the names of relatives she’s only met a
handful of her times in her eighteen
almost nineteen
years.
The engine and the radio and the things her mother says all
stop.
And all that she can hear is the sound of the sea,
feeling sand beneath her feet.
It doesn’t feel the way its felt before,
the sand on the shore isn’t coarse like it is way back where, somewhere
far from the coast.
She stares beyond at the shore at the horizon
and the sun that they’ve been chasing through their drive out
west.
She stops.
Looks back at where they’ve come from, almost smiling
miles away from home.
She takes off shoes and socks and steps
barefoot into the sea.
Sam Moore is a writer of poetry, prose, and drama. He has had poetry published in the DASH Journal, Harts and Minds, and in a Hawaii Review special issue on queer sexuality, as well as publication forthcoming in the inaugural issue of Please See Me. His debut play, Savage, was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August of 2015. Since then he has had three plays performed at the Burton Taylor Studio in Oxford: I Know You (May 2017); Unmade Beds (January 2018); Like a Virgin (May 2018). He is in his final year of study for an Mst in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford.