October 2020
Bio Note: I´m a native Californian who came to Spain nearly two decades ago to teach
English abroad for a couple of years and, thankfully, decided to stay. In 2018, after a nearly
two-decade creative void, into which I fell for obvious reasons, I returned to writing and started
publishing my work, fulfilling my childhood dream of seeing my words out in the world. My debut chapbook,
"The Places We Empty," will be published by Kelsay Books in July 2021, and recent work appears in
Better Than Starbucks, Praxis Magazine, and Anti-Heroin Chic. I live with my wife and
two young children in a former ghost town, where, by day, I work as a telephone English teacher.
Dirty
You hold your hands in front of your face
and frown as if they were covered in mud
or bugs, as if by staring them down
you could zap the virus in a single flash.
My hands are dirty you gasp, soap suds
falling off your fingertips, droplets
still swirling down the drain. You run
back to the bathroom. How many two-year olds
spend half their day leaning over the sink,
fiddling with the faucet until the flow is just right,
alternating between bar and liquid? Four scrubs,
five, six, my pleas go unheeded, flutter to the floor
among flakes of skin. I blast your name
out of the cannon of my hysteria
but you don´t hear me over the rushing water
so I turn it off. Eyes glazed over, you glare at me
and turn it on again, unwilling to surrender
to the foes only you see striking your pores.
©2020 Julie Weiss
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