Oranges and limes rolled about the table
in a game of culinary crochet, with coasters set
as slippery holes, wooden mallets from butter knives.
Chloe filled the empty wine bottles with sand
and collapsible boats, which immediately
ran aground. Nick constructed castles from cards.
The young man with the goatee lit incense
that set the mantle on fire until my daughter lifted
the red barrel and shot, streams of white foam
saving the room. She was only ten then,
that day we got stuck in the cabin in the storm,
the fake wooden siding closing in around us,
the radio full of static and sizzle. We ran out
of cigarettes and then matches, leaving us
to whisper in the dark when the power went still.
One of the guests started to sing, an old camp song,
and then there were rounds of Beatles, a few pop tunes,
even an aria that lasted so long the baby cried.
When daybreak broke, leaving the storm behind,
we all crawled out, hazy-headed and blind, groping
toward the sea. The shore had dropped a foot or two
and the smaller children had to be lifted down
to the beaten sand. The world crawled out, packs of scuttling
sea crabs escaping from cheap beach cabins, looking
for pieces of survival, evidence that we had lived.
Rebecca Morgan Frank has been published in such journals as Calyx, Many Mountains Moving, and The Mid-America Poetry Review. She was a semi-finalist in the 2004 and 2005 Discovery/The Nation contests and the recipient of the 2005 Emerging Writer Fellowship at the Writers’ Room of Boston. She received her MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, where she currently teaches writing. In addition, she is the co-founder and poetry editor of the online literary journal Memorious: a forum for new verse and poetics.
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