Shipwreck on Padre Island

By Emma Comery

While you are deployed, the dog and I walk the winter-hot beach.
Every day at sunset, we venture beyond the other dog walkers, 
the shellers, the fire pits, the footprints,
into the expanse of a trillion microscopic histories compounded into sand. 
I let the dog off the leash, because detachment is a natural thing,
a button gently unmoored from its shirt, a word released into the wind.
The dog sends seagulls into volcanic chaos. He runs into the water, 
up onto the dunes, but always comes back when I call. Here be rattlers. 
Today, we walk further into the pink horizon, 
and a few thousand feet beyond the sound of the highway 
and the flicker of cell towers, he finds a kayak half-buried in the sand. 
He dips his nose to the stern, then raises his leg to claim his treasure. 
It’s a beautiful shipwreck, and I could haul it out of the sand
and drag it back to the car – save $600 on a new kayak. 
The dog has already begun to dig. It’s ours! he barks. 
I don’t join his scavenging right away, but watch the evening tide creep up the shore, 
wonder whether it will choose to drag this ship back out to sea. 
The dog digs faster, deeper, and you—you are out there, somewhere. A name patch
on a flight suit. A sharp salute in a muster. I drop to my knees
beside the dog, claw my fingers into the sand. We are part-time pirates, 
plundering the feeling of making something found – ours!

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Emma Comery is a navy wife and writer whose work has appeared in Arts & Letters, The Bend Magazine, Military Families Magazine, and Reserve & National Guard Magazine. Her poetry has received the Cantrell Prize and been published on Poets.org. Emma earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Old Dominion University and currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. Her debut essay collection, SERVICE ETIQUETTE, is forthcoming from Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, in Spring, 2026.