October 17th & In Flight, in Fury
By Julia Retkova
October 17th
I looked at myself in the mirror and could tell he was standing there, too, and what I could not
see with my own eyes I could feel in the depths of my temples. In the way the rain fell on grey
Sunday mornings. In the stillness between trees, the strangeness of a house at night. I went back
after it had been closed off. Climbed over the garden walls and wondered at the life still
blooming, at that old orange tree you’d smoke and look at, eyes heavy, fingers lax. Even after
you left us they still kept the back door unlocked. The house, heavy and silent and watching.
Wary. It was built crooked, so light only came in through the mornings. The rest of the time
you’d walk around in half shadows. This time: I crept through a forgotten house with the outside
world quiet and thought, here, I am a traveller. I walk through twilight spaces. Here, you never
left.
In Flight, in Fury
They were painting the sky lush with brushstrokes
but when I came to show you
all the colour had dried out.
An empty time. A quiet time.
In my dream, the room we had been standing in
was filled with birds,
and all we could hear
was the flutter of their wings. Deafening.
My head would cave in on itself.
Fullness of a dove’s softness; echoes inside an emptied ribcage.
You see flowers sprouting between the bones and all you could do
was praise the dead—
cloying summers have fallen far beyond that.
If they could see
it would only be so that
they could close their eyes.
The heaviest thing, they have ever screamed,
for it has evolved into fighting a system
which only pretends
to support itself.
Julia Retkova is a King’s College graduate student with two degrees in English Literature and Digital Studies; she’s currently working on her dissertation while running a small literary journal called Nymphs. She was born in Ukraine, but grew up in the south of Spain. She loves reading in the sun and writing when everyone’s asleep. Her writing has been previously published in Storgy Magazine, Literally Stories Magazine, Masque & Spectacle Journal, and is forthcoming in a few others.