Hard half-green tomatoes sink, their lank vines bending low beneath the sun’s harsh glare that blazes against the red church tower lying in the valley’s bottom. The garden my grandfather tended behind his muted yellow house has grown into the grass and shrubs, creeping slowly up the mountain, beyond his mottled fingers’ reach. His spade lies on [...]
Every dog has its night to run free licking the juice of bruised blackberries, fallen in the dirt, not heeding the mothers’ voices calling their children home through the dark, or the soft mosquito whir in the humid air.
At night I dream of half-remembered roads and the cadences of another language stopping and swaying like the movement of a metro car in the dark between stations. I expect to wake to the smell of bread in city streets and the cries of the cheese man, le fromager (a word so much more beautiful [...]
Between the graves and falling snow we climb through rows of stone veiled and silent except for the repeated cry of a blackbird. At Oscar Wilde’s tomb we stop and press our chapped and frozen lips, for a moment, against the stone and lipstick smears and whisper our thanks into the wind.