A poem by Kwoya Fagin Maples
Here’s an Ocean Tale
My brother still bites his nails to the quick, but lately he’s been allowing them to grow. So much hurt is forgotten with the horizon as backdrop. It comes down to simple math. The beach belongs to none of us, regardless of color, or money. We all come to sit at the feet of the surf, watch waves drag the sand and crush shells for hours. My brother’s feet are coated in sparkly powder that leaves a sticky residue when dry. He’s twenty-three, still unaware of his value. It is too easy, reader, for me to call him beautiful, standing against the sky in cherrywood skin and almond eyes in the sun, so instead I tell him he is handsome. I remind him of a day when I brought him to the beach as a boy. He’d wandered, trailing a tourist, a white man pointing toward his hotel— all for a promised shark tooth. I yelled for him, pulled him to me, drove us home. Folly Beach. He was six. He almost went.
Kwoya Fagin Maples
Source: Poetry (July/August 2021