In Madagascar, the vanilla smells of old books
traded across the street from the bar that drank
my college rent. Volatile compounds hide
in so many things that mean home—a spoon
of extract sinking into eggs and sugar, almonds,
an old letter steamed open that says I am waiting for you;
come back. And another that says, I am gone.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 20, Issue 4.
Alice Pettway’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander, The Miami Herald, The Progressive, Teaching Tolerance, The Threepenny Review and WomenArts Quarterly. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Time of Hunger | O Tempo de Chuva, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. Pettway’s second and third books, Moth and Station Lights, are forthcoming in 2019 and 2021. She is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Currently, she lives and writes in Shanghai, China.
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