imaginary cities: eda —

Sister city of the radiant golden hair. Pleasant chit-chat at a water fountain, long pregnant silences between sips from cans. The massive bandages of sympathy and sound. Concourses where the grass has been cordoned off. Traces of shampoo in the air, mottled with perfume-laden leaves. Sharp shoes and tiny foot stockings. Chapbooks devoured like supper, moonlight over the steamy library of passionate renewals and overdue loveletters. Hair that takes off, like a flock of raven stalks. Clothes that fly off, like a sheet being thrown over a line. A line of poetry expressed from the mouth, like a ray of sunlight through the thrown-open window of my ear. A sound shoots from the pavement, like a lock of hair attached to a turning head. Heart-beats, sun showers and lilies. These apostrophe petals from the dim eclipse of yesterday. Feelings that hide behind sunglasses in the rain. Rain like a shroud of sorrow over the moon. Sisters catching the bus home from school. Shadows catching the sisters as they walk through the underpass. Late notes tucked in pockets, lunch a dim memory. Soup ladles, bus routes and instant messages from the world. Cast away, the small slivers of almonds pepper the landscape. Tiny pots filled with water and aloe vera. A large green bottle of aloe shards, drinkable. Bicycles that make me cry of an evening. Curtains across the open seas of windows, glowing with an interior light of meaning. Some healf-remembered words, as I stumbled home through the cold, dark wind. Sesame seeds beneath half-chewed fingernails. The strange looks of dim-wits who see only a foreigner walking a local girl home. The radiant hopes of appointments, dulled by the necessities of artful conversation. How conversations flow or are damned by false lulls, sinister interruptions. Silla dynasty dramas and romance novels, walking hand in hand through the scorched heat of a citizen’s park. Splashing, exhausted, into a pool of algae and carp, because no one was there to catch me when I fell.