Shipwrecked

Contributor: Sarah Henry

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My computer tutor
brings up
the scientific calculator
on his screen.
For the rest of the lesson,
I wonder why
he doesn’t have
a different job,
why we are always
alone on the top
floor of his quiet,
empty house at night.
There are no clocks
on the walls.
The blinds are pulled.
He says he’s retiring
so he can invent things
he can’t explain
and I’ll have to find
a new tutor,
perhaps through
want ads or schools.
Places where
the light of day
shines.

My tutor may have
been an extrovert
once. He might
laugh at desert
island cartoons
on the internet.
They wash
to his online shore.


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Sarah Henry studied with two U.S. poet laureates at the University of Virginia. Today she lives near Pittsburgh, where her poetry has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Sarah's work was also included in Leaves of Ink, Soundings East and The Hollins Critic, among many journals.