~
Une Hirondelle Ne Fait Pas le Printemps; or, At the KGB a Decade and a Half After I Last Went to a Bar Without a Man
Brushing my knee with his, asking if I’ve seen a pair of gloves, if I’ve seen a gray hat. I crouch below the two-seater, alongside improbable Jack Purcells, pat the salt-grimed tile with my own unnumbing fingertips. Later, after he refills my glass with yarns of his intoxicating French ex and the wildness of May ‘68; later, after he holds forth on Nietzsche, Aristotle, Foucault; later, after he declaims chartreuse inarguably my color, declares poetry the body’s guttural manifestation of philosophy; later, he mopes off to some nebulous fete in the West Village alone, bare headed, before the reading even begins. But while still he commands our hastily assembled table-for-three, Lana—Iraq vet, tenured historian, a lesbian—just smiles and nods. What? I say, later, the now-packed room pulsing red around us. He was looking for his gloves. Lana only laughs into her vodka tonic, long since surrendered to water and lime corpse. Oh yes, she says. He was looking for something.
~
Ashley Kunsa
Ashley Kunsa’s creative work appears in numerous publications including Blue Mesa Review, Sycamore Review, juked, and the Los Angeles Review. A native of Pittsburgh, she is currently assistant professor of creative writing at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT, where she lives with her husband and two children.