An End of a Day
​Vera Caldwell

Engelbecken, Berlin

The white roses by the bank dry on their stems in the evening sun,
their petals coated in layers of time’s saltlike residue. You had started walking aimlessly,
not stopping at any one place, not at the pubs spilling out into the streets, nor to look
at the plants growing in the fifth story windows, and now you are sitting in the grass
watching a flock of ducks swim in circles in the reservoir, as if they had always lived there
and as if that reservoir had never been drained and filled and dug again.
You can’t conceive of another evening, of starting a walk and not naturally
finding yourself here. But the world will bare its fault lines soon enough,
will make a home into a waiting room. Get onto the bright sleepy train and let it all blur, as
laundry billows from a clothesline, as a distant parachute breaks.
The train will nose its way underground. Clenched in your fist will be the green bracelet
you bought your first summer alone, before you went to eat lunch at the edge of a cemetery.

Vera Caldwell (PO '26) is a senior at Pomona College who has been previously published in The Agave Review, Blue Marble, and Parallax.