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  • Imagination
  • Nadia Herman Colburn (bio)

My grandma took me on a cruise because my dad left, the boypropped on the red painted stool in the middle of our kitchen, says.

It was awesome. We got to go to our own island, a privateisland, we got to go on a boat the size of a skyscraper.

So now I have a problem. Now I'm not surewhat to do with my own reaction,

which, like the trip on the boat, is alsoa kind of compensation.

Economies of loss.Imagine the space of the boat, trying to encompass it all

so that nothing is left to be sorrowful about, nothingis left to be sorrowful.

I saw three movies,one on each of the ship's three movie screens, the boy says.

Imagine—the Disney Cruise Line advertises—your own Shangri-La.Or imagine for example, the Arawak people who lived in the cays— [End Page 231]

who caught fish and smoked them, who had plenty of time for leisure,who were essentially wiped out within twenty years

upon contact with the Europeans."With fifty menwe could subjugate them all

and make them do whatever we want." Columbus noted in his log.

Perhaps the problem is a problem of tone,which is also a problem of compensation, of balance,

the suffering of this world so greatthat if we reference it at all we zero the sum in its face.

The smoking pit over which sometimes for sport small children were roasted.

In Europe the boy's father tours around with a lover half his age.

What is the absence, that I cannot communicate except in other forms?The boy sitting in my kitchen not my son, the father not my father

who stuck around. In Castaway Cay,you can feed real stingrays from your hand.

The stingrays have been manicured so that they cannot hurt.Everything on this island, the podcast explains, has been designed with you in mind.

If I offer myself what do I hope to get back in exchange? [End Page 232]

Nadia Herman Colburn

Nadia Herman Colburn's poems have appeared in many places, including the New Yorker, the Yale Review, Conjunctions, and American Letters and Commentary. She is completing a meditative memoir about pregnancy and motherhood, pieces of which have appeared recently in the Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, and Literary Imagination. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.

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