Caroline Riley

False Spring, or Brighton

with a line from Maurice Sendak via Stanley Plumly

I love the beach when it’s empty
and cold. Everyone remembers
their first pregnancy scare.
The ones after that blur together.
Grey, then yellow, then grey again.
The evening unbuttoning its pajamas.
Heartache, and lots of it—
a pebbly kind of sustenance.
That’s something you lose
when you get married.
I file my fingernails round
like my sister’s, my twin, who was
my first and most important teacher
of loneliness— its function, its breadth.
I loved not being dead when I was a kid.

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Caroline Riley is a poet living in Morgantown, West Virginia. She is a current student in West Virginia University's MFA program and holds a BA from the University of Maryland. This is her first publication.