Lime Kiln Point

Emma Aylor

1 Minute Read Time

This photograph shows a white building with the ocean in the background. The sunrise illuminates the nightlight ready to succumb over the ocean and land. — Photo by Elmer Cañas on Unsplash

The bull kelp’s lines run
lateral to the shore. They swing
through the brack: loose rumor

shivering larger as it spreads.
From land the kelp punctuates
the difference, stipples a space not here

and not yet deep, and salt breathes
from the split. I am here
because there are no dead.

To walk in their shoes
is unlucky, to lose a needle
in their hair. My family never made it

this far west, to this November gold
as a struck dinner bell with edges
washed clean. The spiders’ light,

strung between lime and granite,
twangs in the water wind and flats
as I move up the slope.

I am here because there are no dead:
I number them on my hands.

Emma Aylor

is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere, and she has been awarded artist residencies at the Montello Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Petrified Forest National Park. Aylor holds a PhD from Texas Tech University, an MFA from the University of Washington, and a BA from William & Mary. She is an assistant professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, where she teaches poetry in the BFA and MA programs.

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