GYPSY

Hannah Mazza.

“With an M at the end it would be a double-palindrome.”

But there was no second M, and it wasn’t.

She sits in the nook of her hostel bunk, reading. Her legs are tan tangles, curled atop her sheets, and her eyes are a double fantasy, luminescent and bold. She’s got a Jack Kerouac quote hanging above her pillow, along with a Bosch print and some photographs tacked to the wall. A stack of books sits beside her bed, some beer bottles and a guitar.

She’s scribbling furiously into a leather-bound journal.

She looks up at me and smiles, a soft expression unfurled in the dim light, slow cooked and sultry. She has dark lips and cute pointed teeth, grey-green eyes and sun-stained hair.

I hand her my laptop and she hands me her journal—we trade souls, typescript and cursive, leather wrapped, paper stacks and digital documents. We sit cross-legged on the floor—Norwegian Wood—and discuss books, art and history.

A Bob Dylan song is playing somewhere.

She’d been reading Bukowski’s Ham On Rye while eating breakfast.

She walks barefoot and takes her time, smelling flowers along the way to the library, and nobody can catch her—she’s too free, too far.

Goodnight, Space Girl

Coast to coast, you grin

Modular Heart, flushed

Brightly beating

Without and within