Melanie DuBose

Village

She lives in a hotel and observes silence. Across the way, someone hurries home to a dinner of peaches and fried eggs. Old women walk into the sea, their big bathing suits billow beside them as they pat the top of the sea with their heavy hands. She is the stepchild of Colin Turnbull and Margaret Mead. When everyone is sleeping she walks along white walls and wishes she was an old man. The names create a rosary, Bowles, Ballard, Burroughs. At the hotel, no one knows her name. The bag contains a thin green towel pushed between heavy books. Like a drunk she worries about reading her last book but in every village she finds the literary debris of tourists lightening their load.

On the edge of the roofs
the old men sit
greeting everyone who passes