by Shoshauna Shy
She met her true soulmate under a beach umbrella on Nantucket Island, felt like she dodged a bullet, but eventually Soulmate returned to his wife.
He took up with a Finnish bricklayer who already had custody of a couple of kids, and neither of them ever came around to liking him.
She inherited a yacht and properties on multiple South Sea islands, and didn’t want to do something that would keep her in any one place – until she fell for another skipper. Their baby was stillborn.
He swore off romance altogether and hurled himself into getting patents for his various medical devices that would help save children in refugee camps; caught COVID; withered to nothing.
She moved to Zanzibar with a man well past his prime, and his patience, who had a slew of bratty grandchildren.
He shambled from one co-mingling to another, convinced the next lady on eharmony would be *the* one, but by the time they met, that one was infertile.
She haunted grade school playgrounds throughout the Sun Belt, imagining there I was and there I was and there I was.
They got back together by August, wedded on a mountaintop, had three more daughters.
Shoshauna Shy is the founder of Woodrow Hall Editions and the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program. Her poems have recently been published by Poetry South, RockPaperPoem, Write City Magazine, and Pure Slush Books. Author of five collections, she is the recipient of two Outstanding Achievement Awards from the Wisconsin Library Association, and was a finalist for the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid poetry prize sponsored by Winning Writers. One of her poems was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021, and another longlisted for the Fish Publishing Poetry Prize 2022.