Back to Issue Four.

Alone with Mother

BY CHLOE HONUM

 

We came out of the sea at dusk
and walked through the dune-grass.
Like runaways, we were free

of the house and its babble:
pill bottle labels, shopping lists.
The ocean banged and frothed.

In the car, we sat a long time,
the keys a silver
starfish in her lap, silence

a kind of love between us.

Chloe Honum grew up in New Zealand. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review, among other journals. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Arkansas, she has received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship.