24 April 2020 (22 years later)

April 24, 2020

                      For Pep, 22 years later

You tried to steal all of my holidays:

your birthday, just days before mine;

Bloomsday forever the anniversary

of your death. Somehow, until today,

Sant Jordi had escaped. Never a holiday – 

none of mine ever were – World Book Day

is now a thing, but then Sant Jordi was mine

by adoption – count the books in my house

dated April 23^rd – and yours by birth: 

Barcelona being the only thing we had

in common when we succumbed to the thrill

of the first kiss, to the knowledge that we had

arrived at our shared doorstep, our first day

of blind choices, so glaringly obvious

in hindsight.

Those six books, because you made it

to a sixth, line the shelf by our bed, the bed

I haven’t slept in since February, since

travelling home to see our daughter fence

and being trapped by this pandemic. Trapped

at home, not home. In a house I never grew up in,

with a father I barely recognize, far from all

those books, from all those Sant Jordis

on my own, with my girls, with you, without you,

on my own.

Here at my home not home I have nothing to hand

which your hand touched, no inscription, no dates,

no declarations of love. This is my seventeenth

Sant Jordi without you, though you never took it

away. It has taken a pandemic. So now, instead

of Sant Jordi, instead of streets full of books and

young people hawking roses, instead of exhaustion

from kilometers shuffled among human currents

flowing past author signings, spending too much

money, weighted by books I will never finish, I am

quarantined, confined. the first Sant Jordi I have

missed. The first Sant Jordi I have spent

just missing you.

kc 23 April 2020
143

Two Translated Books: #TuttlePublishing and #NórdicaLibros

Although I have linked these books on my Professional Page, I thought I'd give them space here as well.
Thanks to Tuttle Publishing and to Nórdica Libros for trusting me with these wonderful illustrated books.