Firsts by Molly Sturdevant

The ocean is not more than a feeling of vast black hills or the yellow unforgiving breadth of the interior. It seemed that way to me, sixteen. I’d never seen a coast before. So. Land sometimes stops. I toed the curl of foam where it slid toward me. I went in. The ocean was calm until it punched me and I tasted it. I stood up. To think that this quantity of water could happen at all, just because gas collided and did a thing then all those explosive formations, chert stone and ice, songs, parking lots, you, dogs, fronds of palm. I laughed out loud in the ocean. The ocean punched me again and I tasted it. I’m not from around here. I’m from long vees of geese hollering down at the broken cordgrass, the one early flake that swallows autumn whole.

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Molly Sturdevant's work appears or is forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, The Comstock Review, Five South, Orion, Newfound, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, The Nashville Review, The Dark Mountain Project, and elsewhere. She was a Pushcart nominee in 2020 and a BOTN nominee in 2021. She lives in the Midwest.