These last few days, I’ve been living off the oranges growing in the front yard of our bungalow. They hang heavy on the trees before littering the ground, like fallen worlds.
Marilyn’s Wig (1999)
The Stray
His one-time girlfriend Leyla Santiago stood in the misting rain with Dr. Nancy from the Best Pal Clinic. The two of them wore face coverings, and he had the car windows up, so everything they said was like mock, mock, mock. A little while ago, one of the vet techs took inside the carrier holding Leyla’s cat, Darla. She might’ve been around sixteen years old and weighed 4 ½ pounds.
Love Passing
She asked if she could show him something on her phone and moved over to sit next to him. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with wisps of her red hair touching his shoulder, or her light green jeans rubbing against his black ones as she made herself comfortable in the booth.
It was an image of one her paintings, a portrait of a middle-aged Black woman on a park bench. It looked like late afternoon – the subject cast a long shadow on an asphalt walkway. The woman’s expression seemed to show both strength and sadness; weariness and defiance.
Chibbed
Out of the taxi and into the bitter early morning air we got. As I stood there watching the group head into the flat, a horrible realisation hit me. I only had a couple of fags left. The garage was only a five-minute walk from Mary’s, so I set off down the road, and, as I did do, I contemplated doing a runner. ‘This night is going to end in tears’, I thought. They usually do. But the lure of a session was, once again, and regrettably, too much.
Driving Lessons
“Ready?” Ba ducks out of the garage, and Pai’s stomach clenches. Four weeks before he heads off to college, which means Ba wants to go driving with him every Saturday morning.
Because the one time Pai went alone, he crunched the side of the vehicle into a concrete pillar in an underground parking lot.
Traveling all of two miles an hour.
“I don’t think—” he starts.
“You just need practice.”
Five Poems from Rose – Editor’s Pick
Jesus bird Walks the way the moonlight Walks on the bayous, Pantanal ol’en sea.