Ann Chinnis

Ann Chinnis has been a student at the Writers Studio since 2017,  where she currently studies writing with Philip Schultz. Ann is a healthcare leadership coach. She worked as an Emergency Medicine Physician for thirty-five years.  Ann’s first chapbook, Poppet My Poppet, is forthcoming by Finishing Line Press. Her work has been included in Nostos, The Speckled Trout Review,  Sky Island Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Around the World: Landscapes & Cityscapes,  and Sledgehammer, among others. Ann lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The Traps

It’s hard to see them in the sun’s glare—
crab traps bobbing a line beyond the point,
molded floats spray painted red with white

numbers-ordered, a fisherman’s warning. I have
seen heedless propellor clip a float, watched
nor’easter beat trap and buoy to opposite shore,

to be mistaken for swimmer or bloated fish. I
motor under the bridge, crack the creek’s glass—between
glare and glints look for hints of the traps’ path. The water

has an algal haze. The current shakes its bubbled
head and mutters. I fished here as a girl, and now
I drift from jellyfish to jetty.  Who was she then,

that girl with fishing rod in left hand, Solzhenitsyn
in the right, snagging flounder, spot, croaker? I
watch her skitter sideways like a crab to deeper

water. She had a tangle of wet hair, fish guts
on her face. She drifted under clouds, sniffed fish
at sunrise.  In the moonlight, she put down

her book, shed her clothes, lowered herself softly
into the triangle of light on the creek, wanting
the sensation of becoming someone else. It felt

like joy to be unnoticed, floating over a canyon,
a river bed tasting of salt and scale, steeped
in sweet shadows of souls drifting home.

~After Rosanna Warren