Editor’s comment: I invited departing selection panel member Anna Evans to contribute this sonnet, which was shortlisted in the final ten for the 2007 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. “Hurricane Felix” was subsequently published in Measure. My thanks to Anna for allowing us to republish it here.
Anna Evans’ poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, and Measure, and she was a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award in both 2005 and 2007. She gained her MFA from Bennington College and is the new editor of The Raintown Review. Her chapbooks Swimming and Selected Sonnets are available from Maverick Duck Press. Further biographical details are available on the Acknowledgments and Links page.
The salty breeze mérengued with the flags
and cautious café owners pulled in tables
as we walked home. Meanwhile, the sea’s white gables
fell and reared up as obdurate gray crags.
But though the next day’s rain was just a drag
to honeymooners, CNN weren’t able
to pull back from the most newsworthy label,
and Hurricane remained the headline tag.
How strange to be inside a media lie.
I’ll venture much news is exaggerated —
the brown spots blackened, low spots thrown up high,
triumphs of normality under-rated.
The story from Aruba: some debris,
a boat unmoored, a lizard up a tree.