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Sarah C. Beckmann is a member of the Somerville Arts Council Board, where she promotes arts initiatives in the Somerville community through a local grant program and the SomerWrites event series. In 2021, she published a poetry chapbook, Naiad Blood, and her first full-length poetry collection, The Race for Daphne, is forthcoming in May 2026. She earned an MFA from Emerson College and works in research communications at the MIT Media Lab. Sarah continues crafting her poetry and draws inspiration from her experiences as an athlete and artist; her identity as a woman and an active member of her family and community; and her interests in genealogy and mythology. Nowadays, you’ll find her rowing out of Gentle Giant Rowing Club in Somerville, on the Mystic River.

A walk with my partner on Prospect Hill

Sarah C. Beckmann

We don’t usually walk to the tower at night,
but tonight, we did. I thought I was
hallucinating when I saw it changing color:

blue, green, red, yellow lights
kaleidoscoping on those dark stones,
the flag at the top, whipping in the wind.

We climb the stairs, take in the view,
and share a cardamom kiss; you’ve taken
to storing pods in an Altoid tin.

I tend to be, what my mother calls,
dead right. (Seemingly not a good thing.)

My therapist wants me to work on
the part of myself that needs to be heard.

As we climb down from the tower,
I think about how truth shifts

in shade, depending on how you look at it.
Did I shatter that looking glass (did it need

shattering)? Or did I hold it closer,
see the cracks, already formed,

hold the shards in my soft hands—
knowing as much as they cut me—

I cut them—

— Sarah C. Beckmann

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