Back Seat Sonnet

By Valy Steverlynck

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My sister and I sit in the car. No children ask 
what is for dinner, have you seen my shirt, can you 
give me a ride. So we sit. And we think. Because now
we can. And we watch raindrops fall, how they slide 
down the windshield— how, without fight, they flow into 
the ditch. “I don’t know,” I say “ I feel like I’ve lost it.” 
“O sister,” she says “I’m already there. Once I believed 
I’d be someone important— director of something— 
maybe president— but now I think, maybe I won’t.” 
My sister and I sit in the car. We watch raindrops glide, 
docile, unwilled— how gravity pulls them into the ditch—
how in their dwindling they sparkle the pavement.

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Valy Steverlynck is an Argentine-American artist, emerging poet, mother, and oyster farmer based in Maine. Valy is a Pushcart nominee. Her poems are forthcoming in Poets Reading the News, Literary Mama, Panoplyzine, Gyroscope, West Trestle Review, Poetry Superhighway, Mockingbird, Action Spectacle, Madswirl, Eunoia, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Main Street Rag, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Cider Press Review. Her visual work has been shown at multiple galleries and museums. Valy can be reached at valysteverlynck@gmail.com.

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