The second bone I broke in this life was obscure: a growth plate at the tip of my tibia—a sledding accident after going airborne on the forbidden hill at Miss Porter’s School. Emergency room, anesthesia, cast...

The long day turned into night, and my father was driving home, me huddled in the back seat, woozy and sore. He stopped at the drugstore for a prescription—but a sports car pulled in so tight he couldn’t open his door. You’re parked too close, he called. I can’t get out. The driver, with the swagger of a free man, laughed. Get out on the passenger side!

My dad returned with the pills, then took his revenge—backed out just enough to accelerate and smash the sports car’s bumper, over and over. The man’s friends yelled, and he came running. I didn’t look or listen—said to myself, Soon this will be over, tried to hide in the upholstery.

The next day when I answered the phone, an agent or lawyer with a voice like oil asked, Are you the girl with the cast? I never knew how the damage was settled—but I did learn how far my dad would go to get even.

two-seater 

his way of leaving 
the family 
behind 

my dad’s new 
AMC AMX  

—Long-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

Cynthia Anderson

A California resident for more than 40 years, Cynthia Anderson is the author of 13 poetry collections, most recently The Far Mountain (The Wise Owl Publications, 2024), Arrival (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Full Circle (Cholla Needles Press, 2022). Her poems appear frequently in journals and anthologies, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, the Red Moon Anthologies, and the Touchstone Awards. She is co-editor of the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens (Green Poet Press).

Cynthia spent her career as an editor and publications coordinator, retiring in 2015. After a lifetime of writing long-form free verse, she took up short-form poetry in earnest in 2020, and since then has garnered more than 600 publication credits for her haiku, senryu, cherita, tanka, haibun, and cheribun.

Two of her haibun appeared in the Red Moon Contemporary Haibun annual anthology: “Formerly Known as Ion” in Volume 17 in 2022, and “Facing the Music” in Volume 19 in 2024. Two of her haiku appeared in the Red Moon annual haiku anthologies: string theory in 2021 and upside down in 2023.

Author’s website: www.cynthiaandersonpoet.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Selections from The Missing Peace by Cynthia Anderson in Mother Memory (Art Exhibit Series, 4/10) curated by Toti O’Brien, in Oyster River Pages (22 July 2025)

⚡ Three Memoir Poems by Anderson in Verse-Virtual (May 2021): “Meant to Be”; “My Lot”; and “Copper Teakettle”

⚡ The Mistress in Verse-Virtual (November 2020)

⚡ Overnight at White Pocket in Poetry and Places (31 October 2020)

⚡ Mythic Rockscapes series of four chapbooks with poetry by Cynthia Anderson and fine art photography by her husband, Bill Dahl: Mythic Rockscapes: Barker Dam Trail, Joshua Tree National Park (July 2015); Shared Visions and Shared Visions II (May 2016); and Hidden Valley: Joshua Tree National Park (September 2016)

⚡ The Transmitter: Cynthia Anderson Answers the Questions That Matter in The Coil (23 June 2018)

⚡ Queen of the Mist by Anderson in The Coil (24 October 2016), one of 12 Finalists for The 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, hosted by Alternating Current Press; poem was printed by Alternating Current Press in *footnote; A Literary Journal of History, no. 2 in 2019.

⚡ Index of Contributors, with links to dozens of Cynthia Anderson’s poems that appear here in MacQueen’s Quinterly, including cheribun, haibun, tanka prose, free verse, prose poems, cherita, cherita sequences, haiku, senryu, and split sequences