At sea at night
we smell hulking ships
miles before
we see their lights.
Are they coming or going?
Will they cross our path?
Green and red and white
dance against the black
while rushing velvet water
against the hull, slaps.
Radar screen
glowing green
offers little support
and radio silence
fails to report.
I grab the mouthpiece
to hail the captain,
across the airwaves I repeat:
“This is SV Fellowship
northbound vessel to your starboard.”
Silence.
“Do you see us?”
Silence.
“Do you copy?
Over …”
We sleep in our life vests at night
because the ocean is a serious thing
and there is a reason why
I avoid rollercoasters.
Bedtime stories at sunset offshore
Lupita Eyde-Tucker is a bilingual poet and translator raised in New Jersey and Guayaquil, Ecuador. She is the winner of the 2021 Unbound Book Festival Emerging Poet Award, the 2019 Betty Gabehart Prize, and in 2018 was selected as an AWP Writer to Writer Mentee by poet Maggie Smith. In 2022 she was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize from Letras Latinas. Lupita is completing an MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry at the University of Florida, and will be a staff scholar at Bread Loaf Translators Conference in June 2023. 
Not Enough Poetry 