Poetry
Nonfiction
Fiction
Cover Art
River-House
Triin Paja
in the river-house, a woman leans from a window
to empty a bucket of laundry-water into the stream.
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when the men’s tobacco and leather words
flutter in the kitchen, even moonlight
begins to rust. there is shelter in the dusty jar of the garden:
I have filled the bathtub with soil. see the petunias
growing there.
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you are what the sky didn’t break. your body is palimpsest, a wooden marionette.
to them, you are an abandoned piano on a shore. the sea
will utter what you no longer can.
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in a world of gardens, even the sky could be another’s voice.
I will bring them apples. I will lay down where the curtains
never cease to move. I will not break the rock
of my solitude—
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the sound of the sunset, the copper samovar—
I look into a window as if it was a door:
in which forgotten language was defenestration our nirvana?
Triin Paja is an Estonian, living in a small village in rural Estonia. Her poetry has appeared in The Moth, BOAAT, Otis Nebula, The Cossack Review, Gloom Cupboard, The Missing Slate, and elsewhere.