Issue 1: Tiel Aisha Ansari

Beach House

A beach house should be built from driftwood,


cedar logs rust-red at the heart and bleached to silver outside.

A beach house should be floored with water-smoothed cobbles


bedded in mortar one step up from hardened sand.

A beach house should be thatched with dried dune grass,

windowed with brown and green glass worn to milky opacity.

The beds should be hammocks woven of kelp holdfasts

and lined with down gathered from the nests of brown pelicans.

We'll take a blue glass float that drifted across from Japan,

(found unbroken among the rocks below the lighthouse)


and fill it with sprigs of sea star and beach fleabane.



A beach house should fall down at the first good winter storm
and leave no trace.

--Tiel Aisha Ansari

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