By LINDA ASHOK
While you play with your tresses,
and suckle your diamond with trust,
while you play with the bubbles
in your lime-soda with that straw,
there’s something you are trying
to place and I am missing it.
By: ALISON PRINE
The opposite of losing you
was watching you across the purple light
of the dance floor in the local gay bar
while the salt trucks dragged through the streets.
By CASSIE PRUYN
Beneath a chalk-white winter sky,
her diamond studs gleam.
We sit parked in the Clam Shack lot, halfway
between her house and mine,
in her mother’s luxury SUV. Her alibi this time:
Christmas shopping for her mother on Newbury Street.
I’m afraid I may be lost. I begin down a brick street with St. Olaf’s Church on my right. Its towering spire, a rusty green, has become my lodestar. I rotate my map about ten different times before hesitating down Pikk, the main thoroughfare. This street name is typical in Estonia, where the letters so often occur in pairs. Yesterday afternoon, when I checked into the Hotel Braavo, I thought the spelling had been a mistake. By now I’ve largely forgiven myself for these assumptions, which I remind myself are unbecomingly American. I try to take comfort in the language here, whose coupled letters offer a welcome contrast to my experience wandering the streets alone.
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