A NIGHT IN BUCHAREST In the third floor apartmentof a fortress-like building, from before the fall of Communist Romania, hers were the last first-hand stories I heard of pre-industrial Transylvania, through cracked dry lips a voice as staticky as the console radio in the middle of the room. Great-great-grandmother of a friend, slunk down in her favorite armchair, surrounded by fading photographs of smiling village faces, her escape from evil’s clutches could have happened yesterday for all the feeling in her narrative. Her tale moved apace from a stroll through a moonlit forest to an encounter with the piercing eyes of a black-robed creature, the strange compelling feeling that drew her closer to him to the sudden glint of the crucifix around her throat, and the other’s stumble backward that gave her the one chance to turn on her heels and run back to the safety of the well-lit tavern. "Of course, this must just sound like an old woman’s fantasies to you young people," she said. But when she was finished recounting the grisly fate of her friend, Gabriela, who, to this day, floats by her bedroom window at midnight, they were our fantasies too. UP FROM THE OCEAN The ones splashing in the ocean are no longer us. No need to even bother looking. That's sand in the folds of your skin. That's a rock pressed hard against your back. It's something called an issue that rides the breakers into shore, that rolls about in the waves, giggling and flailing, that looks like us but is not us. You won't hear them lauding the aesthetics of the perfect tan. Their dreams don't bother with five hours in this natural salon, lazily eying the pages of something from the New York Times bestseller list. The lotion on their faces is dabbed on skimpily, in those excited few seconds when their feet can barely stand still and their bodies lurch toward the magnet of the sea. It doesn't take the leisurely approach, a rub here, a massage there, into aging back and shoulder-blades. For them, a giddy topple and a mouthful of brine. For us, the nudge of a familiar thigh, an occasional warm kiss. As always there's a generation gap, twenty feet or so of golden sand. Hand in hand, a teenage couple cross it, plant footprints deep to them, but shallow to the tides. ![]() John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty, with work upcoming in Blueline, Chronogram and Clade Song.
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