Iliyana Stoyanova

End Credits

Tossing and turning all night. Tomorrow we will inter mum’s urn. I’m so worried I’ll drop it while walking to the grave. I imagine letting it slip, shattering into a thousand pieces, and mum’s ashes strewn across the road. I remember vividly various scenes from movies—comedies, tragedies—those incidents where urns and ashes come to an unexpected end. For the past few months, I’ve already felt like a character in an absurd movie, with everything that happened as real as it was unimaginable.

small procession
the remains of summer grasses
on a fresh grave

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About the Author

Iliyana Stoyanova is a poet, editor, and translator. She has been writing haiku for nearly twenty years, and her haibun and tanka prose have been published in Blithe Spirit, cattails, Haibun Today, Ribbons, Skylark, Time Haiku, Under the Basho, and various anthologies.

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