After he awoke, he did not remember his name for many days. By then, the mess of line that had tangled around his ankle had peeled away. He’d also found the transom of his boat, The Aloha, broken over a sandbar and stretched and twisted and torn like chewing gum. Now he remembered her, a lovely little schooner with a cream-colored deck over a small one-man cabin. The atoll, too, was small. It was so small one could see its east coast from its westernmost point.

E. Merrill Brouder’s poetry is not limited in style or meaning. See the poet professing his love on the Ferris wheel in “County Fair, Senior Year”; delivering an encomium to the natural world in “Hallelujah, Hallelujah”; and asking, “What will become/ of the MERRILL lot/now that everyone has left?” in Genealogy.