Seabird

By: Kyle Rowland

A cashier smiles at the blurry photo

on his out-of-state license,

can see his bygone boyishness

like it’s a bleached Polaroid

sapped of youth’s bright colors,

how the high sharp points

of his smile became

blunted and weather-worn,

handsomed with age, receding

behind a week of lazy shaving.

He’s passing through,

stopping only for cigarettes

and sweet tea and to sleep off

the beer he drank two towns over

and like a static spark

from some ghostly finger,

a jolt of sudden sadness,

inexplicable, knowing

she will never see him again.

She rings him up;

a strand of her loosely-tied

obsidian hair slipping to her shoulder

next to the speck of a mole by her collarbone

and she will never know

that he will think of her often

over years and over decades,

her image will appear to him

like how the sun parts clouds,

like a meteor in the sky,

like a striking bright blip

and then, at the end, when the Polaroid

fades beyond all recognition

its edges curled and brittle

like the smile that hides now

beneath a white wintery beard,

Dementia’s cruelty will confuse

her with his wife of fifty years


and he will tell his adult children

and his adult grandchildren

about how he pulled over

for cigarettes and sweet tea

and to sleep off the beer

he drank two towns over,

about that strand of obsidian hair,

that speck of a mole by her collarbone

and they will know damn well

that isn’t how things happened

but they’ll take his hands,

small and weak and childlike once again,

into theirs and listen anyway.

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Kyle Rowland (he/him) is a writer and poet with a well-founded revulsion of cubicles, time clocks, and neckties. He holds an MFA from Eastern Oregon University and has work appearing in The Sierra Nevada Review, Coffin Bell, and Phantom Drift. He lives in Silverton, Oregon with his wife and a small coven of black cats.