At a Love’s Length
I dream of
a balconied fling;
you know the one,
as in the movies
when I go out for a smoke
on the balcony
and on the balcony
right across
smokes a hottie.
our eyes meet
and a spark jumps over
our glowing cigarettes.
I see her again:
our hands touch
when we throw out
the garbage outside,
we both strain to drop
the beer bottles
in the glass container,
the pizza boxes
over in the paper one.
I dream of a balconied fling,
but across from me lives
a middle-aged dude
who walks around naked
in the summer
and keeps an old bicycle
on his balcony
wrapped in plastic
so it wouldn’t rust
as fast he does.
Who knows,
perhaps when he’s out
for a smoke he too dreams
of meeting the love of his life
instead of me.
Anastasiya Stoeva’s short stories, articles, film reviews, scripts and poems have been published in Interpret, Cineuropa, L’Europeo, Kino and elsewhere. A graduate in Animation from New Bulgarian University, she has directed a number of animated shorts. Her first collection of poetry, Uncommitted Crimes, was published in 2024 and received the “Damyan Damyanov” national award for best debut.
Dimiter Kenarov is a freelance journalist, poet, literary critic, translator. Born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, he has studied at Middlebury College and the University of California–Berkeley. He is the author of two collections of Bulgarian poetry and a book of translations of the selected poems of Elizabeth Bishop. His English-language writing has appeared in Esquire, Outside, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The International New York Times, among others. His work has also been anthologized three times in The Best American Travel Writing (2009; 2012; 2013). He is a member of PEN-America and The Association of European Journalists–Bulgaria. In his free time, Dimiter swims, snowboards, and takes pictures of the world.
