Triquetra

She asked me to write postcards to her, because she loved them, because they reminded her of better times when she would gather her long cotton skirts together and shape them into stiff feathers of lonesome clouds like Stevie Nicks and say she wanted to rock my gypsy soul and spin with her arms over her head, her hands like the shimmer of stars that beckon to sailors in the frail pink light of evening’s end. I took her to appointments and we passed the bottomless hours deep inside our San Francisco tales even though they were now decades old and one of us had died already and maybe that was part of why, and when time ran out we talked about what message did I have for him, and we wondered if the bedroom eyes that got him sick were still as long-lashed and if he was beautiful still, as he was when we were three on the floor at the I-Beam on Haight Street dancing to Every Breath You Take and dreaming it’d always be like that, gold, gold, golden and I never wrote the damn postcards, at least not more than a couple of them before forgetting to remember.

Carolyn R. Russell’s latest novel is In the Fullness of Time, a dystopian thriller published by Vine Leaves Press in 2020. Her poetry, essays, and short stories have been featured in numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, 3rd Wednesday, Litro Magazine, Reflex Press, Club Plum Literary Journal, Daikaijuzine, Orca: A Literary Journal, Bridge Eight, and Lowestoft Chronicle. Her new collection of cross-genre flash will be published by Vine Leaves Press in October of 2023. Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore. 

A Song for Carolyn