Issue Eighteen - Summer 2011

The Lazy Cartographer’s Journey

By Sandra Kolankiewicz

If you never learn them, facts cease to be
true, flatten like the sea before Aristotle,
confining you to local travel except for the few
who have always known the world is round
and so pass on word of landmarks, hostile
atolls, rogue waves, hidden shoals, though
one still can’t grasp what the bottom is like
until he’s there, navigating it. Good luck
then denying the rock you don’t see, the
current that drags you, the gale that blows
you beyond the map, the mound of coral
now calcified, speckled like sand but sharp
as a razor, the open arc of the sky merely the
curve of a circle that in due course will take
you home as long as you can remain afloat.

Copyright Kolankiewicz 2011

Sandra Kolankiewicz lives in Marietta, Ohio, which is in the southeast corner of the state at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers in the Appalachian foothills. Her poems and stories have appeared in North American Review, Confrontation, Chicago Review, Mississippi Review, and Cimarron Review. Her chapbook, Turning Inside Out, won the Black Lawrence Fall 2007 Competition. Her novel, Blue Eyes Don't Cry, won the 2008 Hackney Award for the Novel.

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