She cut her foot, deep and long, on the razored edge
of a broken spiraled shell
and twisted it up from its sandy bed and ran the curve around her fingers
like removing the screw from a cork to bless the bottle for another night
Holding it to her ear and listening for the sea, she felt her blood drip from shell to skin
inflecting the crashing foam contained within that cavernous vessel with a heartbeat
And as she limped home, past the boardwalk and broken bottles from summers past
worn smooth as stone by the ins and outs of tidewater and cheap red wine
She wondered if a cut just as deep on her other foot would leave her weightless
floating inches above a decade's worth of soft green impropriety