A STONE FOR NINA

PAUL GENEGA
Poetry
Published: 2012
ISBN: 9781467542210
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Excerpt from A STONE FOR NINA

These things remain of her:

two tsarist lamb’s wool schoolboy caps;

a silver cigarette box, inlaid with malachite, monogrammed “NC’;

two frayed copies of Soviet Life, plump farmers astride smiling red tractors;

and a faded sepia photo a high cheek-boned woman at the helm of a speed boat, cat-grinning at the camera, captain’s cap cocked jauntily to the left. On the back in pencil: Nice, France, 1946.

These things have been moved from Washington to New York to Baltimore, back to D.C., back to New York, to a tiny village nestled on the Hudson twenty miles south of Albany. They sit in a cupboard silted by spiders.

Nina lies in a potter’s field plot in an unkempt part of Washington. She’s been there for nearly forty years.