But that city means nothing to me,
it spells out someone else's decadence,
other people's dissipation
People lose their all every day
sometimes they even lose the most basic,
the bread and butter of existence,
their lives
Somewhere, people are dying
I am not present-minded
I need my events swathed
in the steam of Ottoman coffeehouses,
the ululations of the centuries
I need history
I will close my eyes
until it's been cauterized
and prepared for study
I am not the only one
Alas for the flesh of this city!
Words cannot recreate it
Hands cannot describe it
This is not enough
This is what I have to give
It has become a ghost town,
an abandoned movie set,
a rejected toy,
the bleached bone of a monument
One of those places
we will occasionally remind ourselves
not to forget
While we bend over our pushcarts
full of words, crockery and beloved plague carriers,
muttering the mantra "But not here;
just not here."
It is really much too easy to become history
I am a daughter of concrete,
but my bedtime stories are all about wolves
I find more beauty in grass sprouting
through cracks in the pavement
than in a florist's shop window
With my lapful of apricots
and my fingerprints like raisins,
I am heavy with history and promise
I am heavy with longing
a workers' utopia
a lovers' utopia
I am everywhere but here
I am anything but this
In the shadow of Yggdrasil
I am smaller than a peppercorn,
I quiver with energy like a kiss
or Mozart's Requiem
a coiled spring, a tottering idol
or a long-distance runner at the Start line
after two false starts
I piss around my margins,
I look over my boundaries like a forlorn soldier
in a Russian song
Storms are brewing like ale, boiling over,
and we are in the cups, my dear
Neither giant nor dwarf,
neither unicorn nor vampire,
but only human, gloriously, unromantically so
proudly, fragilely so
I know what I want
the ten thousand possibilities I want,
but to know myself better
I'd have to be a multiplication table
or an alphabet, but not a language
I love words.
Love them as I love cake
and the weather
and the pleasant warmth inside my mouth.
I would break my body into words
if they could compass this world
or any other
where the stars blaze like lemons.
But I can't.
I can't word this taste,
this scent,
this touch,
the orange tang of skin,
this solitary confinement.
I can try.
I will draw a circle of books,
a pentagram of letters,
a desert tent of phrases,
but it won't be enough.
Zoë Gabriel's poems have appeared in Locust Magazine, Centrifugal Eye, AntiMuse and Cadenza; she has work forthcoming in Salt River Review and Southern Ocean Review. Zoë dyes her hair, but is naturally tall. She loves books, spicy food and colorful socks. She is from Europe and lives in Maryland.