Carina
By Hilary Sideris
Carina, he’d say, as I left for work in thrifted sweaters & pencil skirts. He proclaimed it from our bed where he lay like a pasha, plump, unemployed. Carina—not lovely or beautiful—just cute—was good enough for me. I loved his language. He didn’t love mine. Didn’t read English, not even The Times. He stuck to La Repubblica. Once, we held hands at the Met, gazed at a woman with outsized breasts in neolithic bronze— squatting—the label read. I went so far as to demonstrate when he asked what squat meant.
Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), and The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016).
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