Hopewell Bay: a poem by Cynthia Neely. Number 5 in Volume Five of our limited-edition Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series. Now available.

Cover image: vintage indigo quilt fabric. Series design by Ron Mohring.

Published: September 17, 2017 [49 copies]
31 pages
$9.00 

Poet and painter, Cynthia Neely is the 2016 winner of the Bright Hill Press chapbook contest and 2011 winner of the Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment chapbook contest. Her essay work has appeared in The Writers’ Chronicle and her poems in numerous journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Terrain.org, Pontoon and in several anthologies. Her full-length volume, Flight Path, was published in 2014 as a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. 

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from Hopewell Bay:

4.
Water takes on the color of its surroundings, so a body
of it can be blue-sky, black-night, gray. 
It can be read as the cardinal flower it reflects, or the buoy
that marks the channel. It is green as the grasses
that edge the shore. Grief’s like water. It moves,  
flows. It buoys me up. 

28.
My love, I don’t know how to tell you
what I know. How the sky, once blue, 
now like spillage, greasy and gray, might have one day
opened and let you see how rain is formed,
the weep of it. But now I know how they saw my face, shrouded 
with a constant fury. Now it urgently mouths I’m sorry
while clouds stumble in skies where, once in a while, 
bright and heavenly bodies have the audacity to rise.

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