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Cleaning Lady
by Melanie Sevcenko
She marveled about the no car policy.
Trees like gateways
cobblestone carpet
courtyard, keep-safe, kinder in a confine.The trains here show off their finest building skin
for the bridges above their space,
which is in-between the city, especially as the sun falls.She said it’s easy for her to think of the green metal towers as trees,
when Nature is not around to talk to.And it’s important that the earth around
the train tracks gives us raw, uneven grass.She photographs the holes in the housing blocks,
which moan like the empty sockets of watch towers.It is cold today, but not cold enough to bother
a sentence with a mere mention.I am alone here, but ripening.
After midnight, we smoke things and design the shapes of our arms
like space to shove instruments.But they fall too, as do stars that cannot breath
in the artificial city lights,
and so collapse like the heavy texts
upon my chest by the lamp-side,as a shield to protect my neighborly status
beside such coos and whispers that cannot invite me,and so their soft bedroom words of a foreign language
disturb the printed text I squeeze so tightly.
Melanie Sevcenko lives in Berlin, Germany, where she works freelance for several documentary film initiatives, in education and promotion. She is also a freelance writer for film and culture publications. Her poems and short fiction has been published in Sojourn, a journal of the arts published through the University of Texas in Dallas, and The Fourth River, a publication of Chatham University.
