Alfred Kazin’s Journals are streets and sun and fruit in market crates, and when he and other voices are not in my apartment, I crumple like paper, nothing inside. Then I want to burn at edges and folds, glow into ash. Like the love list my astrologer friend told me to write that I burned in a ceramic bowl on the balcony outside. Afterwards I sent her a close-up of ashes and bowl. I filtered the shot with warm summer light. I did not send her pictures of my tired eyes, my coat and pajama pants, the overcast sky. The morning like a metal dumpster, like cement-block graffiti. And I, not resting gaze on anything, eager to head inside. Flicking lighter in breeze, the paper taking its time.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 19, Issue 2.
Lana Spendl’s chapbook of flash fiction, We Cradled Each Other in the Air, was published by Blue Lyra Press in 2017. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she is working on her first novel.
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