Carol Everett Adams

Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, Union Station, Kansas City

I pay a little extra for an audio wand
so a narrator can serve me a pair of White Star pepper shakers.
Finger bowls of sea salt! Pots pissed in by the doomed!

 
New-fangled faucet handles for warm water baths
in the privacy of my first-class tub.
Would I have wanted to live for this?

 
Bowls we slurped soup from on display,
my daughter’s naked doll, my elephant pendant
caged in climate-controlled glass for strangers to sigh over.

 
The final room is dark & cold, waves projected
on floor & walls, twinkly-light stars out of reach.
I hand my last breath to the Atlantic in a silk coin purse.

Carol Everett Adams has been published in California Quarterly, Euphony, The MacGuffin, The New York Quarterly, Owen Wister Review, Pennsylvania English, Quercus Review, Soundings East, Sweet Tree Review, Westview, and others. She earned her MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska.

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