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
Toast with Existential Dread
by Kamal E. Kimball
Friend, come here and touch my hem. You be the wind, I’ll be the hollow thing singing. I’m falling in love with every arm hair on every rider on this machine. The man in tube socks, ball-capped, reminds me of my father. How someday I’ll miss the old bastard (who I look […]
Fragmentary Pleasures
by Yasmine Eve Lucas
Before meeting Phil and Elizabeth, I’d hypothesized that longings for pity, care, or power might motivate or inform BIID desires.
Poetry as Conversation with Alina Pleskova and Caroline Shurtleff
Alina Pleskova released her first full-length book of poems, Toska, in June of this year with Deep Vellum Press. I read the collection with excitement in just one afternoon. Then, we wrote back and forth together in the interview below in which we discussed the nature of Pleskova’s writing process as a collective, the concept […]
