За Васил Гандев
A book like a shaken hand
by shelves brimming with titles
which, for the moment, reside
beyond the cusp of my Cyrillic.
Let me do what I can to pull
some equivalent details into light:
how we are together in this flat,
your words and my presence
like something accidental –
or out on the balcony where a splay
of firework comes to seem like fate.
I can hear you, like a whisper
of cicadas, like a streetlamp’s hum,
