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66

by Catherine Chandler

Along Route 66, connected by
a six-mile stretch of road, two towns align;
one bears his family name, the other mine.
A geographic fluke? Perhaps. But I,
far-flung, uprooted, off the track, embrace
this synchronicity, this table scrap
of happenstance — two dots upon a map
forever linked in existential space.

The decommissioned highway’s gone to hell;
and so before it all but disappears,
a faded US atlas, dog-eared to
the State of Oklahoma, guides me through
divergent latitudes and hemispheres
and universes spinning parallel.


[A different version of this sonnet was originally published in The Barefoot Muse, Summer 2006]

Catherine Chandler’s poetry has been published in numerous print and online journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia. Winner of the latest Nemerov Award (2010) and previously twice a finalist, she is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has recently been featured in Able Muse, The Centrifugal Eye, Sonnetto Poesia and The HyperTexts.  Catherine is the author of two Chapbooks, For No Good Reason (2008) and All Or Nothing (2010), both from Olive Press.  Her first full-length collection of poems, Lines of Flight, will be published by Able Muse Press in 2011. Print and audio samples of her poetry are available at: http://www.cathychandler.blogspot.com (The Wonderful Boat).

See links to all sonnets by this author

Pat Jones
Published 29 March 2011