Someone outside keeps yelling about saltwater being
too much noise, like the waves of the ocean are
a continuation of the cosmic joke. It’s a Sunday
in a hotel with the beach droning outside,
and a team full of some athletes from another state
that’s north of here, and someone outside yelling
about the noise like they aren’t noise, but it’s safer
inside their noise when I don’t hear my own noise,
the noise of wishing I were dead, and I wonder
who will hear my tide when I become the saltwater
that someone’s child is screaming about
outside the hotel in Florida.
The tide screams to erase me.
Let it erase me.
Cara Swirski is an emerging poet from Cary, NC. She is currently studying chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill with the goal of attending pharmacy school. Some of her work appears in Juste Literary and The Basilisk Tree. In her free time she may be found running, taking a nap with her beagle Remy, or thinking too hard about simple things.
