Cutting paper, the little girl
opens her mouth
and closes it
with each squeeze of the scissors.

Shuffling a deck of cards, the girl
opens and closes her mouth—
inhaling while they’re in the air, exhaling
as they rest on the table.

Nellie Bridge is a poet and high school teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. A bilingual chapbook of poems, Poemas Sueltos, was published in 2019 for the Festival Internacional de Poesia in Santiago, Chile. Individual poems have appeared in Pleiades, EcoTheo Review, New Delta Review, Rattapallax, and other journals.