Returning from Islands

Chuck Noland survived his tropical isolation with
Wilson, is driving down the flat
openness of the Texas highway with an undelivered
package, angel-winged, for Bettina
Peterson, implied hope for the
castaway who can’t return to the life he
had, the woman who gave in, mistakenly, to
loss, and grieved.
The dusty highway swallows his
pain, as the road will do, as at least it
tries to do for me.

I never remember that Wilson
is a volleyball; in my mind, Chuck
Noland’s only companion is a seaweed-haired
coconut head, scratchy and hard; something – the only
recognizable artifact - found with the
package amongst crabs and bioluminescent
plankton washed up on the shore; in my mind, you
are free and wild inside your unbroken
shell; when I try to keep a piece of you with me
on my way to wherever the waves will take me
you’ll be stolen by the current and I’ll have in my
arms only the mystery package, its unfamiliar
address, a doorway to deliver it to.

Chuck Noland and I stand back and watch.
Surely the magic that kept the package so long
intact will open into the dry sun.
Surely none of this is for nothing.

Nina Adel [she, her] holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. Winner of the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2020 Buckvar Prize for her lyric essay Refugere, Nina’s work has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, Moria, Breath and Shadow, matchbook, and many other publications. She is the recipient of a 2023 Yaddo artist residency. She has received recognition in such diverse corners of the arts world as Glimmer Train, The Kerrville Music Festival, and Wolf Trap, among others. She is a Berklee-trained musician, craftsperson (owner of Blue Salamander Arts and Letters), and English professor, and is the editor of the recent anthology A Lighthouse, a collection of immigrant voices from the Nashville-based Immigrants Write program which she directs. She lives in Nashville with her family.