by Yanita Georgieva

Loving in Private

The city dimmed the lights for us.
We touched and time spilled out
like fat coins on the kitchen tiles.    
I imagined the neighbours
cheering for us in their nightgowns:
two kids catching a moment
and stretching it, wide.
When we couldn’t be alone,
we stood like red deer on the stairway
listening for coughs, the threat
of an approaching lift.
Then our hands felt funny in the dark.
I remember thinking
it will never be like this again.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that we stole the night back.
That you held me, in the end.
It’s easy now. Nobody cares
what we do with our bodies.
I could kiss you in so many rooms.
No one is coming. 

Some Personal News!

I cancelled yet another HIIT class.
I don’t know how to clean my hardwood floors
and I feel like it’s too late to ask. I lost
my thought again. I am always feeling guilty
for a phone call that I could be making.
Secretly, I think I should have been a fish.
I don’t know anything about my hometown.
I worry what my dentist thinks of me,
so I Google him obsessively. Sometimes I miss the grief –
how the soft pocket of my misery held me at night.
I am scared of having an opinion.
I check the coffee queue, three times,
for a boy we buried in the winter.

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Yanita Georgieva is a poet and journalist. She was born in Bulgaria, raised in Lebanon, and is currently based in London – where she is pursuing an MA in Poetry at Royal Holloway University. You can find her work in Hobart, Chestnut Review, Alien Magazine, HAD, and elsewhere.

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