on fridays you come home with the evening paper,
shaking sunset and dry leaves off your boots at the back door,
greeting me with a bag of murukku and a kiss to the cheek.
the kitchen’s glow is quiet and yellow, silhouetted
by shadows of a sloppy slow dance,
an orange tabby cat asleep on the sill,
an old dogwood on the other side of the glass.
i catch the chai pot before it boils over.
you pour us a cup each—
extra sugar for me, just a pinch for you—
while i tune the panasonic to our station of choice.
we join a gingery dusk at the table by the window,
spilling the day’s stories onto warm chestnut
and the night’s secrets into
warmer hands.
Isabel Isaac is a senior studying at Palm Beach Atlantic University, where she majors in Popular Music and minors in Creative Writing. She is originally from Northeast Philadelphia and has been living in West Palm Beach since 2015. Several of her works have been published in Living Waters Review. Most of her writing centers around her Indian-American heritage. Outside of music and writing, her interests lie in photography/cinematography, fashion, and cats