POETRY BY YANITA GEORGIEVA

THE QUEEN IS DEAD

The first time I rehearsed her death

it was a Sunday and a man in gym shorts

begged us to just get it over with. I memorised

my task: print the scripts. And oh, I printed.

Copies upon copies of obituaries rained down

and I sprinted nose-first through the newsroom

past the floor mice and the empty rows to shove

this beaming torch of paper into someone’s hand.

There is something about small tasks in disaster–

the soft power of a shopping list after an earthquake.

When my grandpa died, I held my uncle in the bread isle.

We were quiet all the way home. But in the kitchen,

grandma handed us a task list: the blue suit needed to be pressed

the coffin picked, the wheat boiled, the flowers counted.

While everyone was drowning in the whirlpool

she was a woman on a mission–neck above the water

pulling her body upright, letting the grief outrun her, please

don’t wait for me. There is something I need to do first.

Yanita Georgieva is a journalist born in Varna and raised in Beirut. She lives and works in London, where she solves chess puzzles and eats spring rolls. You can find her poems in Hobart, Tint, HAD, and elsewhere.