Sandra Lim, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Ombra

Why do I suddenly think of you
on this late summer day?
I’m far from home,
and you’ve long since receded
into shadow. The flowers here are out in sheets,
and I show my slip like a lily
in kind. Did you just push your ship
into blue waters? How will I work
off my own discontent? It runs through the days
like the weather. Here are appetite and greed,
hoary brown bees feeding on the remnants of a meal.
These days are made of dark glass.
And the past? It’s deeper than the sea. The future
is a picture propped with its face to the wall.

Sandra Lim is the author of the poetry collections The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021); The
Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise
Glück; and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). She is a Distinguished University Professor
of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.