Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

It’s summer, and when it’s summer, there’s always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six-mile manmade Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guesthouses before running over the bayou, through the pines, to lose wind, drip rain, and die in the north.

and his skin was the color of fresh-cut wood at the heart of a pine tree.

I wondered if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking.

The puppy is almost orange. He is really the color of the red earth after someone has dug in it to plant a field or pull up stones or put in a body.

The terrible truth of what I am flares like a dry fall fire in my stomach, eating all the fallen pine needles.

I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain.