Author
You’ve crossed the globe to be here, yet you can’t take the last few steps. Stone fences speckled with age, salute your long shadow. The smell — musty slate roofs, moist dirt — stretches an arm and waits for you to take it. You remain motionless. Houses outlive us, you think, the paved streets too, those… Continue reading A two-beat waltz
The car stops just as I think I’ll never catch a ride. Take me as far as you can, I say, and sit next to a girl in a child seat. Starting work tomorrow, I lie, school’s over. Not a word about the handful of money in my backpack or what it is for. Behind… Continue reading In my mother’s shoes
She’s sitting alone at the second to last row of empty chairs in the dim foyer where the poetry readings are. I wonder where I’ve seen her — is she a doctor, a nurse, one of James’s therapists? Her sneakers, like the white paws of a black cat, are the single diversion from her black… Continue reading The Bard’s Wife
She sits at the bus station, still as the moment between two breaths. What do you do with yourself the morning after that single night, she thinks. What do you feel — hope, hate, regret? A crumb of leftover love? Her hands are fragile and spent. He said they were beautiful, her hands. He kissed… Continue reading a.m. story
a Hemingwayesque Please, say something. Tell me what to do, what do you want me to do. Deliver it with the smile that solves everything. The smile I loved you for. You stare ahead and say, “Have you heard that story about hills being like elephants?” Heard? I’ve translated it—word by word from your tongue to mine—for… Continue reading I must love you again
facing life one coin at a time Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck. Aroha whispered the rhyme, glancing left and right, the rhythm powering up her steps. Magpies squawked and flew up as she approached the rugby field. Her sneakers left shiny dents on the grass, the hem… Continue reading Lucky Day
She’s here to say goodbye. To stock up on memories and use them — as a shield, a safety rope, medicine — once she crosses the threshold of the unknown. Her feet sink into the powdered road dust. Up ahead, the red rock she used to be scared of crumbles in the sun and her… Continue reading The wish
Rostislava Pankova-Karadjova 