"Littoral" by Josephine Florens
Pamela Manché Pearce | Aubade
I want to remember this: The white curtains opened.
Day broke a color field of blue, pink, gold.
It was the coldest moment of the day. A cock crowed.
This trip, over.
His skin tan against the white sheets.
The spent gardenia on the night table, still perfume.
(We made love in a garden of them.)
He was far away from me in sleep.
My nightgown flung onto his helmet and gloves.
(We rode past Knossos’ ancient palace in the moonlight.)
Christos rolled over to embrace me in the warm sheets
of our bed.
(In Santorini they washed the sheets stiff with sea water.)
My arms tried to get all of him. I wanted him so close that my skin was his skin.
We were about to be torn apart, forever. Our feast was about to end.
I would never love anyone else.
What could I take with me but this: the dawn was magnificent.
On our last morning ever, he was lost in sleep
high above the mermaids of Souda Bay.
Day broke a color field of blue, pink, gold.
It was the coldest moment of the day. A cock crowed.
This trip, over.
His skin tan against the white sheets.
The spent gardenia on the night table, still perfume.
(We made love in a garden of them.)
He was far away from me in sleep.
My nightgown flung onto his helmet and gloves.
(We rode past Knossos’ ancient palace in the moonlight.)
Christos rolled over to embrace me in the warm sheets
of our bed.
(In Santorini they washed the sheets stiff with sea water.)
My arms tried to get all of him. I wanted him so close that my skin was his skin.
We were about to be torn apart, forever. Our feast was about to end.
I would never love anyone else.
What could I take with me but this: the dawn was magnificent.
On our last morning ever, he was lost in sleep
high above the mermaids of Souda Bay.
Pamela Manché Pearce, Pushcart Prize nominee for chapbook, Widowland, (Green Bottle Press, London, 2018) is a co-author of Charles Street Trio: A Novel in Three Voices, 2022. Poet-at-large on “Planet Poet: Words in Space,” WIOX radio, the published author of poems, essays and short stories, lives in New York.
Josephine Florens is a Ukrainian artist based in Germany. Her paintings explore identity, memory, and resilience through expressive color and symbolic form. Exhibited internationally, her works have appeared in journals and collections across Europe and North America.
