Sandman<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But she lived and lives in the desert
so his heat didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To her, he was a sandman made of sand, But Mr.\nSandman and his magic touch and the way that her body shined brightly under the\ndesert sun can only last so long before running out of<\/p>\n\n\n\n oxygen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sunlight covered by clouds, the sound The rain dampens the fire you\u2019re used to As the fire dies, its keeper whispers Rain isn\u2019t meant to do this. It\u2019s meant to Make things grow, not make them After a while, the fire is out, and The shore sounds unreal, like a dream, She doesn\u2019t just hear it She listens to the way the waves move, She asks if they can go Over the engine and the radio and the sound of the sat-nav and the sound of her parents, she The engine and the radio and the things her mother says all She stares beyond at the shore at the horizon She stops. 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. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":174,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/mike-yukhtenko-1479951-unsplash.jpg?fit=6000%2C4000&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":172,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions\/172"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
the heat of the desert but with that
magic touch and magic song,
she\u2019d always ask him
to sing
sandman bring me sleep and
dreams of you.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rain<\/p>\n\n\n\n
of thunder, distant, high above, like hearing the
explosions from a film playing in the room
next to yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
feeling lying next to you in bed. Too much
rain, and not enough oxygen means the fire\u2019s going
dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
baby, I can\u2019t bear to see you
cry<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
bring things to life, not make them
die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
wilt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
you forget how good it felt to burn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Shore<\/p>\n\n\n\n
like she might wake, and see the waves fade
away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
she listens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
watches as they rise and fall and
crash. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
down to the shore,
she says
I just want to hear it more
clearly<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
fights to hear the waves above the names of relatives she\u2019s only met a
handful of her times in her eighteen
almost nineteen
years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
stop.
And all that she can hear is the sound of the sea,
feeling sand beneath her feet.
It doesn\u2019t feel the way its felt before,
the sand on the shore isn\u2019t coarse like it is way back where, somewhere
far from the coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
and the sun that they\u2019ve been chasing through their drive out
west.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looks back at where they\u2019ve come from, almost smiling
miles away from home.
She takes off shoes and socks and steps
barefoot into the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n