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
Public Action Art and Performative Interventions in the Chinese Public Sphere: an article by Maya Kóvskaya
If the expansion of the public sphere in Western history was transformative and essential in the creation of democratic, participatory polities, the character and role of the public sphere under socialism (from the former Soviet Union, to Eastern Europe, to China, North Korea and Cuba) has been radically different. In all these places, the power […]
Sob Stories by WinLo333
I’m up at 5:00 sharp every morning, work till my clock dings at 9:30, and then it’s off to the Pond. That’s where I like to run, but you need a resident sticker to park out there, so I park at the grocery store lot and then jog over. When I pulled in yesterday, at […]
Kiss
by Cyril Wong
What is new must also be unexpected and not what we think is new— car crash, stalled lift juddering, bed of thumb slit open, blood the surprise that keeps on giving— or else there is no freedom from our conditioning: your body too heavy on mine; your kiss the same old […]
