~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Evangeline Sanders

Low Tide, Pawleys Island Creek

Pockets of pluff mud sucked our steps

as we sank up to our knees. We scooped up handfuls

and smeared it on our bellies, thighs, upper arms,

lathering our skin with streaks and clumps

of gray earth. Y’all look like a couple of

mud monsters, Grandma called from the sandbar.

She sat on the cooler in her white flip-flops

and dollar store tennis visor. My mother stood

beside her and told us to wash off, so we slipped

into the water behind the marsh grass

and scrubbed with salty fingers, submerging our heads,

burying our toes in shell-flecked sand.

An egret perched on tall twig-legs and

twisted its neck, plunging its long, pointed beak

into the reeds. My mother called again, louder.

Minnows pecked at our ankles as we

steered around oysters and waded ashore. Fiddler crabs

vanished into their holes, all at once,

when we splashed through the rippling shallows.

When your granddad and I pass away,

Grandma said at sunset, we want

some of our ashes scattered in the Pawleys Island

creek. That night, I dreamed someone squatted

by the oak tree and dribbled ashes

into the creek, watched the black dots disperse

and bob on the surface like water bugs.

In my dream, a light wind stirred the pines.

A fiddler crab blinked from the sandbar and saluted

with its oversized claw. An egret screeched

and pivoted its neck. A hundred minnows halted

mid-dance to surround each speck of ash, whisper

something soft and inaudible, sink into

the dark green deep.

Old Skin

I sit on a towel and watch her wade through

the stream—mid-eighties—pink brimmed straw hat,

black and white striped one piece, arms raised

to her neck to fasten a tie. I hear a little gasp,

a suck of air as she sinks into frigid water,

submerging the soft, white thighs, the pouty

lower belly. She floats on her back, eyes closed,

fingers skimming the skin of the water. Suspended

in silence. Streams of hair swirl around her pale,

shriveled face. And her husband, ten feet away,

carving through the clear water, kicking his stiff legs,

grunting with each exhale. When he finishes,

he calls to her and reaches for her tiny hand,

holds it as they step onto the pebbly shore.

Two wrinkled bodies stand in the sun and drip

on picnic blankets. They press white towels

to their faces, sopping up shivers, wringing water

from their limp hair. Sheer skin, swirls of veins,

dappled shoulders. Old skin looks like a shell,

a dried membrane. A taut tarp stretched over bones.

Sloughing off layers with each quickening year,

revealing the red-blue raw. Like when a bird

molts old feathers and shows what is gold

and growing beneath, shimmering like a stone.

Evangeline Sanders is an MFA student at The University of Alabama and an Assistant Editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her debut chapbook, Flight of the Quetzal, is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals, most recently in Sky Island Journal. She is a Charleston, South Carolina, native and graduate of Clemson University, where she received BAs in Psychology and Modern Languages. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.