This poem features my dad’s Sunfish sailboat, which we sailed on our little lake in the 60s and early 70s.

Dad bought it used, but only gently so.  We put more miles on that boat in the first summer than it had accumulated with its previous owner.  Dad and I were calm and talked little when we sailed together.  When my best friend and I took it out our goal was to sail past the docks of the boys with the big motorboats.  It was when my cousin Leah came from Chicago to visit that the boat’s potential for capsizing was realized.

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“Underwater Sisters” was published by Prairie Wolf Press Review in their Fall 2010 issue.

Underwater Sisters

You wanted to switch places with my brother.

I told you how bored you’d be in Michigan,

that we can’t bottle fireflies on July nights,

have to go to  bed during…