by Juliana Gray

You are a tourist among tourists. A bus carries you to Normandy beaches, somehow navigating down narrow village roads without scraping paint off the houses. You pass a field the guide tells you is growing linen. In summer, its flowers will be blue; then they’ll be harvested, processed, made into crisp white sheets. The sand on Juno Beach is strewn with broken shells. Omaha Beach is a resort town, sand gleaming like beaten gold. You feel the urge for souvenir, but the shops make you queasy. You nudge loose a pink shell with your toe, looking for one that’s whole.

Juliana Gray is the author of Roleplay and Anne Boleyn’s Sleeve, winner of the Winged City Chapbook Press 2013 poetry contest. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from River Styx, Tupelo Quarterly, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.