top of page

My Sister’s Life Sinks on the Day of the Titanic’s Anniversary | Cynthia Pratt | 3rd Place Poetry Contest Winner

The hue of her wooden frame turned cerulean

after her husband left.  Blue now covers the heart’s

jagged rock limbs.  She becomes a skiff that skims

dark midnight but never returns home.  Periwinkle wraps

the sail although she will still stay as sad as blue crags,

sink into the sapphire ocean until she grabs a blue tang fish

to see if she will drown with it, and she does gasp, choking

on aquamarine loneliness, never mind that the man, now gone,

is silent as the inside of a shadow. I try to tell her to forget

this glaucous man, but she sends the debris of herself

to scatter amongst the blackened escarpments.

 

Cynthia Pratt (she/her) is a founding member of the Olympia Poetry Network’s board which has been in existence for over 30 years. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, The Raven’s Perch, The Writing Disorder, The Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Dreich Magazine, Kestrel Journal and other publications, and in the anthologies, Tattoos on Cedar (2006), Godiva Speaks (2011), two anthologies by the Fusion Collective, Dancing on the Edges (2017) and Garden of the Covid Museum (2021), Hidden in Childhood anthology and the anthology by Washington Humanities and Empty Bowl Press, I Sing the Salmon Home (2023). Her manuscript, Celestial Drift¸ was published in 2016. A former Lacey Councilmember and Deputy Mayor of the City of Lacey for the last 12 years, her term ended in December 2021. She is the first Poet Laureate of Lacey as of 2022.


229 views

Comments


bottom of page