Kate Ravin

Lament for Lynn

Damned cancer snatched my second soul, best friend,

our heads, bent close to whisper, brown and blonde.

The girl I knew would get me, understand

each ghost that froze my bones, each flaming fiend

that seared me in the dark. How can I find

another nurse to suture any wound

and roll me up when I have come unwound?

Beside her, every woman is outgunned

as schooner to destroyer. Bridges? Burned.

New friendships start out full, but all have waned,

leaving me to stumble, shadowed, blamed.

I ask myself, since no one else has chimed,

were Lynn and I the only two who rhymed— 

or is there, like a double cherry, twinned,

a sister midnight crow to test the wind?

Kate Ravin, a freelance writer and editor, lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned an MA in English Lit from Emory University and currently is studying with Annie Finch. Kate's poems have appeared in The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. An additional poem, “Mnemosyne,” is forthcoming in Ploughshares.