Beach Trip, 20 Years Old, Six People, Weird Weather
By Kelly Dalton

The sunset looked like a 3-day-old shiner:
Yellow and green and somehow puffy.
Ashes fell out of the sky
From a huge forest fire counties over.
Wind whipped the ashes into our hair
And open mouths.
It was too cold to swim.
We felt post-apocalyptic,
Like Mad Max on the seashore,
Like the only ones left alive,
And we were stinking bored.
We played Risk,
We overran each other’s plastic armies
And drank too much,
White Russians in big ugly plastic cups
We’d gotten free at football games.
The strange logic of mixed milk and alcohol:
Makes you think of both sides of your mother.
We ate chocolate cake
And bickered over dirty dishes.
I sat sometimes on the sandy porch,
In the olive-drab light,
Army-colored,
Thinking, here we are in the afterlife,
And this is what we do.

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