She Sells Seashells by the Seashore
Microfiction
She was out of sand dollars at her shop. And the order hadn’t come in yet. So she leant with her legs crossed and her arms crossed in the open garage out back and made crossed looks at early morning vacationers as they walked their dogs past in the sandy alley. In town, there was no sight or sound of the ocean. Just the scent. The air was all mist that morning, wet and briny, like drunkard’s spittle, and she wrinkled her nose to retreat from it. Then the wind broke upon her face and shot her hair back from over her eyes. The breath of the sea washed up the canals of her nose. And she felt as if she had been unwillingly resuscitated by some ancient immortal deity of the deep.
Andrew, this is good! It's good to get something from you in my inbox again!
I often have a hard time appreciating prose poems. Most of them reject shape and don't seem to offer something in exchange. I think you've overcome that here.
The sentence lengths and their varying levels of grammaticality seem to work like line and stanza structure would in a more formal poem. And the way you've woven in gentler rhymes in the form of assonance, consonance and alliteration work similarly in comparison to perfect rhymes placed at line endings.
The staccato "crossed" in quick succession followed by the openness and majesty of air is masterful. Well done.