CONTESTS

Return to the Lake of Shining Waters

Andrea Scott

When frogs sing—fat and wide-eyed—look

at the essential, pulsing, cracked moonshine

 

of it all. With eyes limpid and joyful, rest

your exacting plans. Imagine your hands in a brook

 

as not-real hands. Do you remember a special

green life? Webbed. No troubles. Are you sorry

 

to have lived as a human? Sunrise will be wasted

on whispered confessions, on romantic bunglings.

 

Why not head to the woods, the water,

the dumb amazement of your first home?

 

Know the rise and fall of your old skin,

as it breathes for you, slow, in the grove.

Collage by Andrea Scott

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Andrea Scott

Andrea Scott is a mother, writer and high school teacher living in Victoria, BC, the traditional territory of the Lekwungen peoples. Publications include The New Quarterly, FreeFall, Geist, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and The Antigonish Review. She was longlisted for the 2023 Room Poetry Contest and the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. She won the 2022 Geist Erasure Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the FBCW 2022 Literary Contest and the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. Her first chapbook, In the Warm Shallows of What Remains, was the winner of the 2024 Raven Chapbooks Poetry Contest.

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