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.
Website: Cynthia-pratt-poet.net
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