Issue 10
CITY – 6 MINUTE LISTEN
Jei Degenhardt
1.
There are days I will always
remember by the shape of things
around the impact
Here, the rain. How figures keyhole into it
turn
and I was holding you
grip like waterweight slipping over storm drain
hollowing into crowds, too,
steps before buildings
sat where there has always been someone else
this walling, this division of blue,
and I can always see behind
me in such glass
so that forever there is nearby somewhere
low brick and tangled chainlink,
tripfoot wire, that midnight
I saw you through
what place pushes starlight back
what happens here
glowing still
there aren’t cities in the dark
cities run red or run bright, night another name
for a separate kind of breathing
you and I drenched in light the night one thin stream
carries your breath to me and I hear waves of static through the phone
I cannot feel between us and afterwards I am staring at my spine, wondering
through glass what past emerges
we have 1.3 seconds of history in the light that comes from the moon
225623 miles arriving in a slam on concrete
no accounting for that mass,
a blink across void
shouldn’t windows shatter then, in the nearness of headlights,
streetlamps in the neverdark, proximities push back
the stars, this light erase
reflection into bluish flakes
the thin frame of a bus stop
2.
Green of tarmac
cracked where roots stretch below
Hovering green of leaves
in lamplight over parking lot
Gutter green of autumn
Borrowed green of shoe’s sole
carried with you
Caged green
of fenced sapling
Pierce green
of eyes in crowd
Green of summer
which must have been last night
Greyed green of
tree in rainwater
Watching green
of branches tapping window
Could it have been summer last night
Smell of green decaying
behind the shops
Tenuous green of Hilton
in greyblue sky
Warning green
of oil slick puddle
Black green of park grass in night
or shade on a sunny day
Ailing green of sky-edge
at evening
Memory green of what was
missed while it was there
Brief green
of magpie iridescence
Green of there still being
something living
3.
I could tell of places where words dropped off
tongues, dissolved out to mist under traffic
lights. Passing a junction with friends I learned
how air can change from red to amber, I
was sixteen, am again under sodium-
vapour lamps on the edge of roads, warm and
cold where black and orange slick my face, these
final colours of the city, the last
I have to tell, and the things they retain.
The purr of tires, uncertainty of steps,
voices knocking into each other, not
looking when I cross and almost catching
myself somewhere else — will it be a
city still, the next time I remember
and if my breath stops, slows, will I see
each road takes me farther into the same
place, the same place, I look up
and the words are still rising
Commissioned by Read Manchester for 6 Minute Reads delivered by the Writing Squad and Manchester Literature Festival in 2017.