Amico Island Artwork by Erin McGee Copyright 2006

66 For K Along route 66, connected by a six-mile stretch of road, two towns align, one bears your family name, the other mine. A simple geographic fact. Yet I, who've had enough of yellow woods, embrace this synchronicity, this gracious scrap of happenstance: two dots upon a map inextricably linked in time and space. A dog-eared yearbook often fails to quell the might-have-beens haunting these forty years; and so this U.S. atlas, opened to the State of Oklahoma, helps me through divergent latitudes and hemispheres, and universes spinning parallel.

Catherine Chandler was born in New York City in 1950, the eldest of seven children. She obtained her B.A. from Wilkes University in French Literature with a minor in Spanish. She has a Master of Arts in Education from McGill University, Montreal. Catherine teaches Spanish at McGill University's Department of Translation Studies and also retains an administrative position at that university. She has poems published or forthcoming in The Lyric, Iambs & Trochees, Raintown Review, Blue Unicorn, Möbius, Harp-Strings Poetry Journal, Modern Haiku and Texas Poetry Journal. One of her poems was judged the best poem in the Summer 2004 issue of The Lyric, and she also won a prize from the Illinois State Poetry Society.