Her Name Was Neda
Evgeniya Dineva
My mom called but I didn’t pick up,
she says, waving at the bartender for another daiquiri.
It’s Tuesday and we take whisky shots
before we get kicked out
and I skip work the next day.
We see Hamlet on Thursday
but she is laughing so hard
that people start to hush and turn.
We leave before the end
to thread the burnt orange ground
and toss mud in the foamy green water
by the factory outside town.
I never finished the book you gave me.
She grabs more mud to drown
and tells me she slept with a guy on Wednesday.
We go to the zoo in the afternoon
because she hasn’t seen the penguins yet
and some plants in the garden have bloomed
at the wrong time of the year.
It’s just us and a bunch of preschoolers
with their teachers.
She scolds them for throwing popcorn at the bears
but we all get ice cream in the end.
I no longer ask her
what she’d call her daughter.
Evgeniya Dineva is a poet from Bulgaria. Her works appear in The Hong Kong Review, Ethel, Asian Cha and others. Her debut poetry collection Animals Without Fathers came out in November 2023. Evgeniya is a fellow of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing.