Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

I Think of You as I Walk to Jazzbar Vogler  
Stephanie Kartalopoulos

Munich, 2008

The shops along the way have long since closed.
The stones on the walk barely reach their freeze.
The Isar River, a sculpted version of itself, dulls

in the January night. Everything I see follows
the lead of the nurses who prepare for another night
of wondering how deep your sleep might be, how long

it will take for you to shut down. Everything
you could still have is no longer yours—the Ohio house
with its cement driveway. The post lamp at the edge.

The dream neighborhood of post-war houses.
The kitchen counter where we rolled the dough for apple pies.
The husband who used to sing your favorite songs

in the car on a Sunday drive. A picture
of your every love and childhood dream realized.
I am half a world away from you, asleep

and at the end of your life. I see my breath,
empty and tired in the oily and dimming street
light. How much time is left to tell you, yiayia,

about this darkness and how it can dizzy a girl?
What a thunder, to listen for what I never learned.
This indelibility. The rasping lung of night.

 

Stephanie Kartalopoulos is a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at the University of Missouri, where she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature. Her poems are forthcoming and published in Grist, 32 Poems, Waccamaw, Phoebe, Barn Owl Review, and Harpur Palate.