Poetry: “Aubade for Long Distance” by Cole Pragides
Watching your love leave when you know their home is far from yours is particularly painful, but the moments before their leaving are truly something to be worshiped. Cole Pragides “Aubade For Long Distance” praises the lover’s closeness in images of deep red stained glass, flickering candles, and pews. But what makes these images feel novel is their proximity to a backyard natural world—to serviceberries and a dress on a clothesline and a gum tree’s star-shaped leaves. Though the parting is sorrowful, this aubade contains in its closing lines a deep persistence, a “belief” that the long distance will be melted like wax.
Read Pragides’ poetry below.
Aubade For Long Distance
Your breath is quickening, my love
2.
Stained glass hangs
as serviceberries, the night
so dark red around us
3.
The whole season I embraced the treasures of waning moons, channelled
The prevailing westerlies, weaving the firmament
Into a dress, so I could suspend the apocalypse
4.
If the lost cannot be forgotten
If this dress is a church we slip into
Together, each exhale becomes a prayer
5.
To worship the air between us, I understand
your body as a candle, my touch
A pyrrhic flying buttress
6.
Your flame struck the dark, lightning
7.
Clotheslines flickering in the wind —
8.
My love, sail the dark hyaline
burn a cavity to mark the fall of night
In your brevity I donate all my clothes, flashing all
my myths against my myths
9.
Igniting belief.
10.
The summer broke as star-leaved gum
I will melt all distance between us–
11.
With glowing eyes, circling cormorants measure love
In shadows of all the pews they are meant to leave
Cole Pragides
Cole Pragides (he/him) is an emerging writer who currently lives in New York. His work has been featured in wildness, phoebe, The Southeast Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. Find him flying a kite.
