by Laura Sobbott Ross

It was an all-night party
she will confess later.
Splayed and snoring on the beach,
she draws the curious, mostly women.
We cover her with our shadows.
That’s my daughter, I tell them.
She’s had too much to drink.
One of the women asks if she can pray for me,
and another asks if my shorts are from Shein.
Yes, I say to both, remembering the pattern
I wear is of brightly colored fish.
Dreamless eyes. Hollow, gaping mouths.
Tailfins that long for current
but are caught in the stitches of seams.
As the mother of an addict, I want to
tell the other women there is no rock bottom,
at least not one my daughter has found.
She just sinks a little deeper, I mean to say,
but the tide has already begun to rise around us.

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Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and a writing coach for Lake County Schools in Central Florida and was named Lake County’s poet laureate. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and have appeared in Meridian, 32 Poems, Blackbird, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Poetry Prize and won the Southern Humanities Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She is the author of six poetry books.