HORAFI
by David A. Porter
for Leontios
A short walk from our bus stop on Strovolou,
the scent of honeysuckle begins.
You grip my index finger
as we walk up the empty street toward home.
There is the periodic hiss of traffic behind us,
the staccato bark of a small dog
patrolling a nearby driveway,
the first bright stars.
We step onto the sidewalk
that rings the empty lot
a block behind our building.
Here in Cyprus they call it
a “horafi,” “inheritance.”
It is November and
still warm and dry;
the usual rain has been scarce,
but enough to bring forth
a gift of high, thick grass.
It cannot be resisted,
and you are off,
tearing through it.
You are as certain
as you are unsteady;
you stumble and I let you.
I wait on a small hill
at the edge of the lot.
I listen to your chatter,
to the soft FM static
of your sneakers kicking through the grass.
You run.
David A. Porter is a graduate of Rutgers University and San Francisco State University, where he received his MFA in creative writing. Porter was a co-founder and the managing editor of 20 Pounds of Headlights, a literary annual. He has published fiction and poetry in Cold Mountain Review, Connecticut River Review, Ghost Ocean, Hotel Amerika, Nimrod, Orange Coast Review, The Santa Clara Review, Sojourn, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Surfer’s Journal and you are here. Porter lives in New York, where he is working on his first collection of short stories, Protracted Adolescence, a collection of poems, Ghost Season, and a book about music, 20,000 Things I Love.