Your tail lights flash a goodbye as they sail off down the driveway.
And I remember, again, the way the steam obscured everything when I held you in the bathroom, willing your lungs to bring oxygen into your tiny body, you clinging to me like a lifeboat in a hurricane.
Jenny Mattern is a poet, a crafter of stories, and a cake-for-breakfast enthusiast who lives with her family in Montana. She is represented by Nicole Eisenbraun at Ginger Clark Literary Agency.
They say love is always
patient
and kind.
But your fury
sometimes knows
no self-control.
They say it’s better to love
and suffer
than to not love at all.
But my bruises
beg
to differ.
They say a lot of things about
love,
but they’ve never loved
someone like you.
A marketing specialist at a Romanian national radio station, Teodora Vamvu lives in Bucharest, Romania. Her microfiction and short prose have been featured on 101words, Spillwords, and MetaStellar, and her first non-fiction piece was a finalist in F(r)iction’s Creative Non-Fiction Sprin 2024 contest. She is also part of two prose anthologies published through Amazon, available in Kindle format and print-on-demand, and an upcoming poetry one.