Author Archives: Eva Petross

What’s the strangest thing I have done this past week, you ask? I was going to say it’s actually been a pretty average week, but then I remembered the moment where I was crying over Beth Moore’s memoirs playing in my earbuds on Audible while surveying the bloody remains of a wild boar I stumbledContinue reading “Of Boars, Beth Moore, and Solo-parenting”

I didn’t expect to be freezing cold when I first heard the news of a friend dying in a bombing. I didn’t expect it to be now, 16 years after we first moved to a warzone. If you had asked me, I would have told you that news would have most likely come when IContinue reading “Mubarak”

Those were the nights we had dreamed of – lying awake on my grandmother’s quilt, fingers and ankles intertwined around the nursing baby, listening to her heartbeat and the bark and hiss and whirl of the unfurling outside. . We slept deeper than dreams of home, of sisters making their way on the far sideContinue reading “The First Year”

It’s the kind of night that makes me want to be a bat. Warm and luminous, I feel them trace blindly above, drunk on fruit must and space. The sky is a beach across which they glide, ignoring the white pumice resting in tide-striated clouds freckled faintly with glass. . Of course, I am hereContinue reading “Hide and Seek on Full Moon Nights in Malindi”

Dear daughter who glows in this marvelous space, I must tell you a secret about this whole place. In this room you call home where you dance and you play, the world that you’ve known from your birth ‘till this day, though it’s safe and its good, it is only a part. Put your earContinue reading “Doors”

Someone once said that silence is God’s native tongue, so it’s just as well you have always been so good at learning languages. But there’s no guide in this new world, is there? No grammar to consult, no friendly neighbor with whom to practice. Only deeper forays into the incomprehensible land, exploring. No map toContinue reading “To My Mother, Upon Losing Her Voice”

I sit on the ground with your mother and twenty more who mourn in the threadbare shade outside the hovel where you were born. The mats beneath us are frayed and worn, our bare feet lean against each other. Flies hover. . She’s telling me of last night in words that collect in the lowContinue reading “Namesake”

I miss you most when I am happy. . When dark rain pulls itself up over of the ledge of the horizon, heavy with thunder and the leniency of a storm, . When I turn down into the riot of an unfamiliar market alley, and for a span, find myself adrift in a reef ofContinue reading “Mourning”

(I wrote this one a couple years back in the haze of baby days) . Daybreak fractured by the pad of small feet. The incessant squirming between us in the blankets the piercing sweet whispers, “Mama, what’s for breakfast?” . Staggering into the blur of the day without a proper good morning. I don’t hearContinue reading “Morning Run”