- © JStadnicki, 2020 / Stroud / UK
Photography: © John Stadnicki, May 2020
Photography: © John Stadnicki, May 2020
You wander countless streets
pass a pandemic that seems
to go on forever.
But nothing is eternal.
Photography © John Stadnicki, 2020
Rite
Sunday lingers on scent of paint,
tobacco and spring. Our kitchen-war
sprouts from a conversation on books
about people we both know. I say
I’d met doctor Zhivago queuing
at Nero’s, heard him asking a barista
about the fate of taiga-trees
at the height of a mining season.
You think they are cut short then stop
growing. I lock my paperbacks
in a cupboard; they remind us
of all the ink twisted in verse, seeded
in layers of gravel. Our verbs reach
the pit of a quarry, and seal over.
Snow forests shoot up in tears,
we trip over extension cables in our flat.
© Maria Stadnicka, May 2020
Photography: © John Stadnicki 2020
Photography: © John Stadnicki, 2020