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 breathe
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.
Above our bodies that float side-by-side
in back stroke
is our bodies
floating side-by-side
as a motion picture
in the mirrored ceiling.
I see how our bodies glide in opposition to
each other's size and structure
and how my bathing suit is low cut, unsexy
but brown and form-fitting to my tight bulbous body
like a silk coating of milk chocolate.
The pool lights rotate their fiber optic cycle
guiding our auras from pink to purple
to emerald green to truer blue.
But despite the shape of things
our bodies love to love each other,
and unusual to my needs
I love how you force yourself inside me
without caress or gentle touch
without ease
without warm-up
a rapt knock
without letting me feel you grow against me
without knowing I'm ready.
After Polish vodka
in a small tattooed bar underneath
the frigid dry streets
of a flat dark
and edgeless Warsaw,
you move about the hotel room
acting out your newest film in your underwear.
You project the action in all voices and angles
as I drift in and out of sleep.
In the morning I sigh off your imperfections,
pleased that I am strong enough to see to
where your image cracks.
You think you are old,
I remind you you are young,
that the lines under your eyes do not denote years
only dissatisfactions,
mere beauty marks
for artists like us.
I am jealous when you tease me about my youth
and nervous when you ask to hear the stories I've scribbled
and kept separate from everyone.
I begin each one in a shaky voice
confusing narratives as your smile grows devilish
and your eyes squinty.
And it's there, in an unwavering gaze
where I see how your history leaves you.
You, who your father tried to kill
You, who spent 25 years filming your demon
You, who gave yourself to the girl who wanted your baby
You, as you extract Codeine from Vicodin
You, whose next film will star only spooks
You, who will uncover your father in a heap of boxes
And you, who will kill everyone in the end.
Melanie Sevcenko is from Toronto, Canada and currently lives in Berlin, Germany where she works freelance for several documentary film initiatives. She is also a freelance writer for international film and culture publications. Her poems and short fiction have been published in Sojourn, published through the University of Texas in Dallas; The Fourth River, a publication of Chatham University; newleaf, Germany's leading English-language literary magazine; and Nexus, presented by Wright State University.