Pick-Up


 

We were so awkward—he the first Asian I bedded and I his first Westerner—I giggled myself to sleep when he left my hotel room that night.

 

Still smiling in the morning, I waited on the beach where he had, the day before, collapsed his limbs like pick-up sticks on my beach towel.

 

We’re together still.


James Penha

Expat New Yorker James Penha  (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha

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