Island Police

used to follow me

when I went to physical therapy

running housewife errands

and in Montana

a highway patrol car

trailed us

when we drove back to Spokane

when my husband and I

returned from a family visit

to his stepmother’s house in Wyoming

before she had her accident

and passed on

just like the highway patrol car

gives up the ghost

and sometimes in Spokane

I get a ghost of a memory

that those police trail us too

like a vapor of a strange life

a nagging feeling

possibly wrong

but the island follows me

even in the States

 

 

Paula Anne Yup lives and writes in the Marshall Islands. She has written poetry since childhood and published since college days. She has over a hundred poems in print with work in anthologies (Feathers, Fins & Fur, Earth Beneath, Sky Beyond, A Kiss Still a Kiss, What Book!?), journals (Earth’s Daughters, Mid-American Review) and other literary publications. Her first book, Making a Clean Space in the Sky, was published in 2011 by Evening Street Press.