Another cold city,
dirty snow piled between the luminous
skyscrapers
Being a guest in a house full of love
is not a very comfortable place to be
We retreat into native languages
when we cuss
or when someone is giving us pleasure,
frustration and bloodjoy alike
pulling us back to our mother tongues,
to the sense of protection
and the rages of childhood
Nobody will hold your hand,
no one will ride to the rescue,
there will be no one to kiss it better
Whether you hop along like an elf
or trudge, elephant-style,
you will have to move eventually
between the skyscrapers
It is a cold land,
flat and hard and fertile
The sky weighs more,
it demands much more
the winter trees are starker
You smell of the cold,
your face, your hair, your clothes
your blood runs smooth and ruddy
as a stream in a fable
The fruits of common human kindness,
hands outstretched across the void,
seeds on stony ground
You with your Picasso nose
and your Jackson Pollock body,
with cat's eye on your cufflinks
and a cat's tail in your trousers
You speak as into a void
You speak now only to irritate,
for even anger is a form of attention
Your friends have blood on their hands,
you have only bitterness
We had too much history on our hands,
but we surrendered it
It fell through out seams,
scattered through the rips in our pockets
like small change or coffee beans
Now we are weighed down
with shadows of a lost country, a dead land
We sit in the winter sunshine,
close our eyes and flatten our ears
like old cats
Comfort means
going through the house on tiptoe,
listening for reassuring creaks and rustles,
turning off the lights one by one,
all but the porch light
and the lamp strategically placed
before a window with the blinds left open.
Comforting to consider burglars so naïve
or so easily discouraged
as to believe that in all the houses
in all the neighborhoods of this city
there are people burning the midnight oil,
fully capable of defending whatever
they are most proud to possess,
huddling over their baseball bats, trip wires,
alarm systems, door chains, guard dogs,
like cavemen around a makeshift hearth.
Zoë Gabriel’s poems have appeared in Centrifugal Eye, AntiMuse and Cadenza. She is from Europe and lives in Maryland.