decides the fate of every love story, even when a cloth is sodden with wetness. He and she ride to town on a noon bus, she, sitting on his handkerchief. They have been sent for groceries, he, one week new, friend to her father, under him at the Consulate. Packed in with peeling leather bags, chickens, goats, dark-eyed men speaking Spanish, not one seat bare. Bruised mango fruit, split. Sticky floor. Her blood, fed by the rules of (her father?) a different country. His heart beating, they must sit very close, a man at the front ordering all windows stay shut. Swollen clouds, his white shirt wet patched, sunned skin peeping through (him?). His arm rims their seat back, whisking her shoulders at each dip in the dirt road. Moss scent and she hears palm trees, feels green-winged birds about them, scattering (her?). The voice inside full-throated, nearly a sob. Air, thrumming with flies. Her tan skirt, it breathes if his bare leg leans. If the invisible (god?) hand—the gold chain, cross at her neck—unclasps.
Further Reading
The Men Who Grow from Curbs by Lauren Schmidt
We’re made of beer cans and cardboard. We crease in November wind. Our blood streams in the whiz of cars. We groan like engines, wear mismatched boots. Our eyes are gears that crank a screen of all the lives we’ll never live to see. Our skin is yesterday’s New York Times. Our spines are made of […]
Winter by Jasna Dimitrijević
translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox
Since I moved away to a bigger city, I seldom come back home. Only for holidays and the anniversaries of a few people’s deaths.
The Life You Ruin May Be Your Own
by Jeremiah Moriarty
They say this war will be fought in the air but it’s finished in these uninsured teeth and a rage for sweets. I reach for a reason, the unified theory of my own unrealized potential, and maybe it’s no more complicated than believing a lie someone told me about myself. A specialness. Self-made sucker. How […]
