3 Poems Washashores Review Published

Washashores Review Volume 1 Issue 1 Summer 2025

                                                                                                          

Real Estate

​

When you suggested we buy a house on this island,

I went nuts.

Are you kidding, I said.

A five-hour car ride from New York?

An hour on the ferry?

Our friend Alan, cool, practical, said

he’d never live anywhere that requires a ferry.

For three days I tried to talk you out of it.

It was covid. Who knew how the prices would go?

The builder, Jack, a nice guy, sure,

but all builders are nice when they’re selling.

Then one morning I woke up and panicked.

What if you listened to me and we didn’t buy the house?

I’d miss the sand, the sea, the sky,

the spindly oak trees we see from the porch,

trees that will surely last longer than we will.

At 6 a.m. I woke you.

Kevin, I said: buy.

 

 

                                                            #

 

 

 

                                   

On My Application to be the Poet Laureate of the Oak Bluffs Dump

 

 

One reason

I apply:

no competition since

I invented the post.

Another: new

XtraTuf mud boots

make me feel

like a real man

though I’ve only

seen women

wear them.

Another reason:

hauling

stinky bottles

cans cartons (no lids)

yields sense

of purpose

especially

on day

of no writing.

En route

I listen

to Adam Bede

on Audiobooks

negates real man feeling

but replaces

with other

better one,

the real me.

 

Surly dump manager

double checks

town sticker

to remind me

I’m new

on the island

where new

means undesirable

like Hell’s Angels

undesirable

(they like

pretty towns

too -- why not?)

all of us

crashing

cans cartons

bottles

into dumpsters

buzzing

with flies

overloading

septic systems

poisoning

shallow bays

with algae blooms

and toxic nitrogen.

All of it

our fault,

mine too.

 

My first poem

in my application to be

The Poet Laureate of the Oak Bluffs Dump,

two words:

 

Forgive us.

 

                                                            #

 

 

 

Chappaquiddick

 

 

We leave the big island for the little one

in the soft white light of early spring,

the only car on the three-car ferry.

It’s the Saturday before Easter.

 

Clusters of daffodils in glorious bloom

line the forest path, the lone spot of color

amid tints of red shimmering

on the spidery tendrils of beech trees.

 

Dirt coats our shoes like a fine dusting

of cocoa powder. We pass

the community center, a cemetery,

the lone store on the island, now closed.

 

By the time we reach the pond

we haven’t seen a soul for hours.

Alone, I walk onto the bridge.

A woman died here because

a man was careless.

 

The day is cold but windless.

The sky cloudless; the ocean,

sparkling and calm -- the aquamarine 

of warmer, more forgiving waters. 

 

The enormity of the tragedy,

the stupidity of it, all lost

in the silence here

at the end of the earth. 

 

Here there are no human errors --

only nature’s handiwork. 

 

 

                                                #

 

Author Bio

 

Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times (Magazine, Book Review, Travel; Op Ed); also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She won a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York and in 2021, a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. In 2022, her poem, Memento Mori, was a winner of the Martha’s Vineyard Poet Laureate’s 2022 Contest. Her Chapbook, Weight, was the first runner up in the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest and was published in 2022 by Choeofpleirn Press. She is the writer of the New York Times bestselling Powerplay (Simon and Schuster) and author of Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she studied political theory at college but wishes she had spent more time studying Keats. www.franschumer.com