AT THE TITANIC MUSEUM


you can lower your hand into a tank of water
that’s the same temperature as the water in the North Atlantic
on the night of April 14, 1912. 

Placards fixed like headstones line the walls of the playroom—
Step into the Captains Bridge and Steer the Ship
Sit in a Lifeboat
Try to Climb the Sloping Decks of Titanic

The third class cabin, the Grand Staircase,
the replica dinner plates and deck chairs
conjure up all that went down—
three-thousand bags of mail, thirteen unfinished honeymoons,
toddlers with tummies full of stewed apricots and currant buns
who watched the stern rise into the sky like the end
of a teeter-totter in that small spot of ocean
that’s forever their own,

like this snowy hill in my town where my children are sledding
is forever ours.  With coat cuffs secure at their wrists
they pull up their knees and glide down the slope where the earth
is breaking through under the sun.
I stick my ungloved hands in my pockets
and touch the souvenir boarding pass while my children
climb back up to me, their faces sparkling like glitter on water.

Kim Lozano teaches creative writing for Oasis in St. Louis, Missouri. She serves as a contributing editor at River Styx and also co-directs the River Styx at the Tavern Reading Series. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Daily, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Journal, Denver Quarterly, Midwestern Gothic, The Pinch, and elsewhere.