Spirited Away1st Place in the Poetry Writing Contest
|
Issue 19
|
|
She says his name is Chihiro, the
black and brown dog I see a few times a day now, across the street. When the sirens sound. Like the anime? I ask and she says she doesn’t know, he was a rescue and came with his name and I say he’s sweet and she says he speaks at least three languages. And she tells him to sit in Hebrew and he does and we compare how long it took us to make dinner yesterday, with the up and down the stairs and the sirens and lighting the oven and turning it off and she says today her only goal is to clean the oven. Mine, I say to clean the dryer filter. We nod and laugh, happy we could take showers, not wash our hair, not enough time for all the products, but the body. We pause. Count our blessings. And the Russian boy plays his video game and the baby coo’s, wide-eyed, adorable. The American with blue nails reads a James McBride book. It’s a good book, I told her yesterday. Or, was it the day before? Or night? |
DR. TARA W. ZAFFT won 1st Place of the Poetry Writing Contest. She, a writer and educator, is the most recently Winner of the Moonlit Getaway Poetry Prize. She has published her work in several anthologies and literary journals. She has a BA in Russian Literature from UC San Diego and a Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Bath, UK.
|