Two rose petals were stuck on my left hand
biting voraciously into metacarpus;
and I could not stop them ,
and I knew they wouldn’t go away;
when the alarm clock
came to the rescue,
I woke up, once again,
in my roach-infested apartment,
in Bucharest, Romania, at 5:30 a.m.
one January in the mid 80’s,
with a frost-bitten hand ,
the one left out
of the two superposed comforters.

Until today, I cannot tell
the dream from the nightmare.

©Elena Malec, California 1997