Kim Thayer
Sultry Beach
Oil on Canvas
Seaside Wedding
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The bridesmaids, their dresses belled like upside down flowers,
their faces, pistils waiting for pollination,
walked to the edge of the shore for photographs.
Their delicate shoes abandoned in a heap
like the divorce that eventually followed. But now the beach is empty
as the marriage, as the house scrubbed clean and vacant.
Its occupants moved separately into smaller apartments. The ghost
seagulls coming in for a landing just hang. The bridesmaids themselves
have grown wary, dresses thinned and faded to old blossoms
or long ago given away. The train of the bride’s tulle dress transformed
into a cloud, a paper shade over sunlight, and the memory of that day
just a bruised smudge along the horizon. Sand smoothed of footprints,
not even a plover’s small tracks. The guests departed years ago
to change into comfortable shoes, their swollen feet propped
on their coffee tables. The beach no one will visit again.
And the sky, the bruised sky.
~ Kathleen Aguero
Meet the Creators
Kim Thayer
Ms. Thayer is mostly self-taught, but worked with master impressionists during her early years of painting. She mostly paints beaches and dunes around Ipswich and Essex Bays. Ms. Thayer travels for commissions and shows, frequently painting in the islands off the south coast of Georgia in winter. Her goal is to move viewers to a feeling of a place. She and many in her family work to protect wild land.
Kathleen Aguero
Kathleen Aguero’s most recent book of poetry is World Happiness Index from Tiger Bark Books. Her other poetry collections include After That, Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth, Daughter Of, The Real Weather, and Thirsty Day. She has co-edited three volumes of multi-cultural literature for the University of Georgia Press (A Gift of Tongues, An Ear to the Ground, and Daily Fare). She teaches in the Solstice low-residency M.F.A. program at Lasell University and in Changing Lives through Literature, an alternative sentencing program. Kathleen has received grants from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Elgin Cox foundation.