Seashell
By Jacqueline West
She came to him nameless, palm over her lips.
This was all he could ever take back from her:
the tilt of her head, the hungry look in her eyes
that suggested she understood. Never promised.

She followed him from room to room, along stone paths,
down to the sand, self-contained as a shadow
stepping in the footprints of his words. She would chase
his sigh, track him down twisting halls by the clue of a single syllable.

She swallowed his voice, drank his sentences,
unanswered letters sinking to some hidden depth.
All his thoughts, dreams, pasts, were lost beneath,
as secure inside her as something drowned.

She kept the chamber nearest his, no more silent in her sleep
than awake. Late at night, sometimes, he crept inside
and lowered his ear to her parted lips, finding there
the hiss trapped in a conch shell, the insatiable whisper of the sea.

Jacqueline West writes in eastern Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and her dog. She is a writer, poet, and soon-to-be-published novelist.