Kami Westhoff is an award-winning poet and short story writer. She's the author of story collection The Criteria, and three poetry chapbooks including Cloudbound, Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising's Dare to Be Contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. Her prose has appeared in various journals including Booth, Carve, Hippocampus, Passages North, Meridian, Waxwing, and West Branch. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. A Woman is Shoredand of course she’s dying: noose of seaweed, carve of clamshell, barnacles pock her body with their feathery bullet mouths.She’s centuries dead, or anotherwoman last seen alone, eyes like onyx stabbed into sand, skin the shade of slate.Still, he’d like to kiss her lips, slick her tongue with his own and call its wet desire. If he holds her just right, she’ll bend herself backwards and blow his mind. On the morning she’s found, jellyfish scatter the shore, blob the sand with the miscarriage bodies he will blame her for. A man consumes a woman like the night blinds the day with its dark. A woman offers herself to the day, prays for its swallow before another dusk.
