Stephanie Howe Sullivan

Amherst

A metaphysical eccentric—

Shut in upon herself by choice.

Her silent self personifies

Page after page. I search the words

She seems to share between ourselves.

We nobodies that nobody

Knows, but that everybody sees

Each time they look upon themselves.

Her loneliness I comprehend.

It is the company I keep.

A metaphysical pretender—

Shut out of Eden—I stand

Beside her grave, lay flowers, and weep.

Stephanie Howe Sullivan is a poet-lawyer who graduated in the inaugural class of the poetry program in the University of St. Thomas MFA. Her poetry and reviews have been published in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and Dappled Things. She lives in Houston where she is Trial Training Director and Adjunct Faculty at South Texas College of Law Houston.