The poet spent her summers in Malibu as a kid. This poem has never been published.
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It was Malibu where our lips
were their pinkest hue
with Pollyanna attitudes
we’d paint on stunning smiles.Â
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Standing pier-side on the seaweed shore,
half-dressed in string bikinis?
we’d gaze beyond the wild blue.
Time was irrelevant back then
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assuming the role of blithe beach girls,
listening to the fires flirt
long into the night,
friends to our ears like seashells.
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Boys would gather to boast
with their boards and the sunlight
seemed more brilliant back then?
waiting for the ocean’s break
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to bathe us deep inside our bones,
swallowed into another world
ebbing and flowing on a bed
of sand, until one day it vanished
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as though it had never been?
leaving with me here
bare-lipped and longing
within.
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Carol Lynn