by Cole Pragides
Once I visited my old roommate
at a film festival
on Scheveningen beach
where the winning movie
was something avant garde
and vaguely religious
we did not understand.
Afterwards we danced to
Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”
within the sand dunes all night,
the wind transforming the blanket
around my shoulders into wings,
my roommate recounting how their friends
in Atlanta held their newborn
for the first time.
We biked miles back into town
and laid next to a canal.
As we smoked weed, they confessed
they might never be able to live
in our home country again.
I know, but tonight let’ s pretend
we’re the loves of our lives,
I retorted, swinging a stick
to hit another out of the air.
Murmuration began overhead,
the birds changing phase
according to the relative strengths
of our anger, wonder, and fear.
The sky moved without permission.
We let the mosquitoes circle
and bite our legs bloody until light.
Small volumes of ourselves
hung in the air around us
as we ignored all the ways to start over.
Cole Pragides is an emerging writer living in Queens, New York. His work has been featured in wildness, phoebe, The Southeast Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. You can find him flying a kite.