Issue 4.5

Waiting for the Bus Tonight, twice I missed the thirty-six line, like how I once lost you in Raleigh’s crowd late October: south wind warm, not chill. You longed for home by a Basque town where wine-faced sea and whales turned. Masts lowered, sails furled by the stone pier, South of Pyrenees, your grandparents first met: church bell rung, lovers soon parted by oceans. Bordeaux’s rivers spread like snowflake crackles, *Scachs d'amor* sung year after year, till candle wax spent, Parisian nights burnt: like how I once lost you in Raleigh’s crowd late October: south wind warm, not chill. That day sunset shimmered, filling our goblets. We strolled aimlessly along Fisherman’s Wharf, salt crystals stung your bronze-dark eyes. Redwood branches grew tender sprouts. After winter, mid-spring, if you are willing let’s go to San Diego, where wine-faced sea is still turning, and south wind warmer still.

The Pier On cold winter evenings you would push aside my homework then lead me down to the pier with rods over your shoulder. We would cast into the cold dark. When an eel dug spines in my arm you chopped it into a bucket. That bait got the fish biting but most of the time you’d be checking your phone. The messages lit your face and took you far away. When you left for good I hated everyone else— my struggles have landed me drinking wine in a penthouse above a sparkling city. Everyone says I’m successful but I can’t stop thinking about your phone-lit face and that cold dark water you said was heaving with fish that could feed us for weeks.

From a Distant Dream I was on my way to a distant destination, when I came across a store full of dreams. A green-eyed girl, stood in front of the house, peddling dreams of sorts and assorted colours. They were of myriad sizes and shapes. Some were green, like a garden of fresh flowers; some yellow as though their life was gone; some glowed in bright and brilliant red, like a river of blood at a goddess’s silent shrine, and stacked on rows and columns like cattle. In a dark corner where no eyes penetrated, was a rack of blue dreams, lying in limbo, like a woman awaiting a lacklustre hope, as she could not stem the tide of death. My body was a mess, and I could not choose the colour of a dream or shape to take away, as my bones, once hard like the Zuma rock, turned to biscuits, broken at every joint. I decided not to make dreams my master, for gold can lure a man to debilitating death, what a million years of promise would not derail, making disaster look like life's last liberation. I stood before the store, as people came and went, a beautiful bungalow with an exit into a far country, where departure had no link with arrival, but a shameful exile into a strange land. I stood before her, wondering what to do, as each man clutched a dream with a smile, and departing gazed not at the moody sky, while I stood, thinking about my lonely life. The lady rushed to me with knotted brows. *The dreams have gone, and I’ve no more to sell.* *Try another store; perhaps they may have some left,* *or return tomorrow when I may have some more.* I raised my eyes and saw a desert and a ghost land, surrounded by shadows without a dream to embrace, two people whose dreams were dead or buried, but what lay in their eyes were each other's dreams. All my previous days and years petered into a piffle, but here’s an oasis meeting me in this desert race.

Grain of Sand “What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know.” —Augustine, *Confessions* You walk the edge where wind reshapes a dune as breakers wheel, splay, splinter, wake in haze— thick clouds erase the sharp horizon down until the day’s all mist in its blue house. Each moment on, another moment’s born. Chill, restless waves shall crest, defer, and spill till entwined shells are sharpened into bone along the wrack-line where detritus spools. Trekked sands err trackless through air’s hourglass; recollect their light upon unsolid ground. Dark sea pitched up beyond a patch of grass takes with it something of the strand’s parched green. Each catchall spark blows by which land’s outgrown while memory sails off, quick, grain by grain.