By Koss
The way teal and endless cyan skies can carry you over the ocean of seventeen hours, of fuck ups and lost things, and frantic racing through corridors. There’s the comfort of whirring sounds and too-small bottles of things served by girls clad in cadmium with matching lipstick. And finally, the kind, chatty, troubled Aussie drifts into slumber midflight, and your unraveled body is strewn over emptied seats, and you steal a couple hours of sleep. Upon waking, the sky flies at you through the tiny portals and you might become the blues of another country whose light is unnatural and strange. And then you find the luggage revolving on conveyers and spot someone with love waiting for you, also busting with cumulative lust and a pining. 
At her apartment, exhausted, you death sleep in her bed and wake to a tiny trembling wombat she holds next to your head, tinier than a fist, curled in her palm as she gives it Reiki. You ask her what is a wombat and what is Reiki as the animal breathes its final nips of air. The Reiki doesn’t work in this instance. Two days later, at the vacation house in Manly, while sipping daiquiris in the February sun, she tells you she cheated on you with her ex but that it didn’t mean anything. Several thoughts tumble joke-slow through your head including maybe this should have been disclosed before you bought the ticket, and you know this is where the story should end, yet you persist and raise your finger to the waiter, “May I have another drink, please?”
Koss is an artist and writer with over 200 art, visual poetry, poems, fiction, and experimental work in journals including Gone Lawn, Michigan Quarterly (Mixtape), Bending Genres, Cincinnati Review, Spillway, Harpy Hybrid, diode poetry, Five Points, Spoon River Review, San Pedro River Review, and many others. They were included in Best Small Fictions 2020 and won the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Award in 2021. They also received Pushcart and BoTN nominations for fiction, CNF, poetry, and fiction from Bending Genres, Variant Lit, Gone Lawn, and Outlook Springs. Find links to their work at https://koss-works.com.
MoonPark Review 