It’s quiet in the still frame of air-conditioned mid-July, in the white-washed walls that smell like fresh paint, in the echoed hum of five-hundred unfurnished square feet.
While you sleep on a king-sized mattress in the next room I lay the mushrooms carefully in a pan, two inches apart so that they do not cry and become waterlogged and grey with proximity.
They sizzle to brown crisps and I wake you gingerly with coffee. We eat on the floor in the pale light of afternoon.
I cook rice that evening. My mother tried to teach me how to make each grain full and soft and entact, but I never listened, rushing ahead to a boil and now each grain is a broken ball of glue, burned black in the bottom of the pan and in the next room there is a mattress and a cup of cold coffee
Grace Willis is a student and poet from the Midwest, where she is pursuing a Master’s degree in English Literature. Willis has poetry published in Novus Literary Arts Journal as well as Roadrunner review.
