How to Love a Sinking Island

Winner of the 2025 49th Parallel Award in Poetry

Forget dull facts of shovel, pail, pump,
and sail. Instead, shed curl and skin-scale
like gecko in every sweat-rimmed linen. Leave
traces, knowing the body has already gone
missing. Forget the necking up on Tantalus,
no more idling cars or privacy in groves
that decompose to other kinds of shelter. Forget
slick treasure-trove of lychee you once lifted
thanklessly to your lips. Forget their fullness
and how they wanted you. Forget peel, pluck,
snip, blanch, rip clean. These are privileges
of the dry. Forget sighs. Forget all papers—
they cannot be saved—that melt like petals
on the water. Libraries of petals. Forget wistful
diaries and albums, or scribbles slipped
into lockers, lockets, and drawers.
Be friendly with the attic of your life—
whatever you’ve crammed up there out of sight
among the garden gnomes and musty
muumuus one day comes of use. Like all
forgotten roots. Disregard all sea-logged maps,
hazard lights, dirt tracks. Forget your star
signs and divinities, redemption like a bowl
blessed by just a little salt. Praise
low-lying clouds and walk lightly over
dead things. Strike matches into wind.

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Lana Reeves is a poet and composer from O'ahu, Hawai'i. A finalist for the 2025 Iowa Review Award in Poetry, her work is published or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She received her B.A. from Harvard University with a dual degree from the Berklee College of Music, and she is a current MFA fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.