Thursday 28th April. Malmo – Stockholm – Lulea Three times the announcements change their language before I step off the train to sleep in Lars’ apartment. I have been here once before in summer with crowds along the quay. Winter now; red berries. At dusk more crows than trees.
Ash is so fine, it, every day, filters through our letterbox and air vents. It is breathed through the nostrils into our lungs, fills our minds with poison. Furthermore we do not always know who it is we have breathed in. The notebook slipped from my hand, tumbled to the floor. I lit a cigarette […]
The passion flower had doubled back on itself, the curls of new growth returning, a snake on its own tail, twisting and thriving on the stems of dead older siblings. Stacia did not know if the old growth eventually fell away, or if it became green again, and this ignorance caused some anxiety and grief […]
Fires smoke the air, the scent a soft comfort from an iron wood stove that calls across the snowy hillside, blazing inside with logs you and Dad needed a whole day to split and stack. You exhale visible breath, hoping for it to turn to icicles and plink to the ground, like in Saturday morning […]
“I want this one for my obituary,” she turns a wallet-sized portrait toward you. You swallow splinters; don’t want to think about a world without her. Matriarch. Role model. Mother you never had. Propped on one elbow, sun through sheers halos her grey curls. She rakes stiff fingers through photographs scattered on the bed like […]