Sarah Daly

Sarah Daly is an American writer whose work has appeared in As It Ought to Be Magazine, The Spotlong Review, Rejection Letters, Down in the Dirt, and elsewhere.

Cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves you fed me, too much chai and too many biscuits on a Sunday afternoon.

Of countless Sunday afternoons, which are too near to remember, where we murmured syllables of an ancient tongue, your clipped tones guiding my accent to pattern yours.

Ancient elegies of love and war, repeated until my pronunciation was seamless; gods, goddesses, and prayers, lengthening my stay minute by minute; two-thousand years compressed into a few mere lines, so carefully reworked and preserved.

The rains we liked best, a universal pause, an excuse to prolong our lessons, though by then, we had forgotten their purpose; the ease of domesticity lured us as we rinsed and dried your rose-patterned tea cups in the hours after.

So we split seeds and heated oil, chopped tomatoes and boiled rice until their aroma removed our disquiet and soothed our tired tongues; we wove narratives over candlelight,