I.



The first

          (not your real mother’s

but she took you to raise)

sleeps like ashes in a box,

etching smoothed to a sigh

over years of turning it ’round

holding the stone in her palm

through every Sunday service.



II.



Your husband’s,

          cut away in a sterile room

from a swollen, bloodless finger,

a day after you disclosed the affair.

Stray fist against the stone walls of

a home in a storm slowly melted,

never realizing what was broken.
No way to save it, they said.

Now he wears it as a groove,

bone raised around empty space.



III.



Then it was your own

stolen by a whisper of current,

surfacing from the Gulf waters.

You renewed your vows there:

a beach outside Pensacola,

salt in your hair & a sting on your lips.

Eighteen years, give or take a separation.

Hands naked,

            broken,

                    joined together

remarried to an ocean.

Previously published online in Eunoia Review