Bad Boats
&
Search for Change
Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
Bad Boats
Rowboats on rocks,
silver bottoms up, in January,
shored hull to hull, say fifty?
Dad had turned over each
in hopes of finding you fetal
under one, dry, even safe.
Now the boats nose into my drydocked dreams,
a school of silver fish giving chase
to the nightly lie.
Nobody’s there, not even a throw bag for rescue.
But you would soon rise, eighty feet from shore
“Just like Jesus!” the well-meaning said, “think of Jesus.”
But that’s nothing to me
as I sit late in your shadowed room,
dark enough that I can pretend the pile-up
of clothes, books, “personal effects”
still dumped on your bed,
going on three years now,
is your gentle, obdurate silhouette,
“only sleeping,”
so the other headstones say,
not rude enough to make a splash.
Search for Change
When I rang your bell that October afternoon,
a toothless stranger answered;
he’d never heard of you,
but I was sure this was the right apartment, A1-4
(And I stood my ground, thinking of your last roommate who left you
heart-shaped notes, pinned by serrated knife into the sofa . . .)
But he shooed me like a mistaken trick-or-treater
and I started ringing all the bells,
yelling your name up to the cell-block units,
prowling the tiered parking lots,
“Have you seen my son? He used to live here,”
as if you were a missing pet,
wondering if you were watching, amused
from some door crack, dropped leash.
A Halloween puppet
(orange legs crimped, questionable smile)
dangled off a balcony.
After two hours, I finally found
the Substance Abuse Office, “Search for Change”
(bean bag chairs, Columbo reruns)
which gave me your new address reluctantly.
When I finally found you, you flicked off my upset,
mumbling something about having thought you’d told me
you’d moved.
The next month the detectives set me loose again to look.
“Busy work,” they later admitted, “done for the family’s sake;
“Gotta keep hope alive,” they spit out,
though they’d already assigned you to another file, Special Victims,
“Alcoholic, bi-polar, borderline,”
where no further searching was necessary;
they knew you had moved on.
A graduate of Vassar College, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle received an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop as well as a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Iowa. She also holds MAs from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and New York University. In addition to scholarly publications, her poetry has appeared in many journals. Her chapbook, Black Wick: Selected Elegies, was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Tupelo Snowbound Chapbook Contest. Chosen as the 2020 Chapbook Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press, Black Wick: Selected Elegies was published in 2021. Kennedy-Nolle was winner of the New Ohio Review’s 2021 creative writing contest. Her full-length manuscript, Not Waving, was just chosen as a finalist for the 2023 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. It was also chosen as a 2021 finalist for the Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award, a 2021 and 2022 semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes, and a 2022 semifinalist for the Two Sylvias Press’ Wilder Prize and for the Brick Road Poetry Contest. Recently appointed the Poet Laureate of Sullivan County for 2022-2024, she lives and teaches in New York. Kennedy-Nolle has just been awarded a Poet Laureate Fellowship for 2023-2024 from the Academy of American Poets.