KS PALAKOVIC

The City

From the roof of a laundromat we watched
the city writhe under red-and-blue police car
glow, cheap wine and mild night blurring the scene
into romance, our dreams kept secret
as caged optimism in your torn knapsack.

And when one of the bottles escaped,
smashing on the sidewalk, we laughed, knowing
the sirens could never catch us if
we kept moving, together. Because one day
there would be tall grass and fields
of pure snow untouched by the hustle, the hate.

Maybe
I stayed in the city too long
and it grew up around me like grapevine,
the twisting promise of tomorrow’s reward refusing to let go;

On my balcony now, the wine has bittered
in its glass. And beneath the sky’s polluted orange,
among the hungover music of car horns,
cat brawls, child wails, I hear
an old promise to get out: I remember
your cheers as the burgundy bloodied the pavement,
snatched away from our hungry mouths.

Perhaps you too escaped the city’s maw.
Perhaps your window looks not on
parking lots and chain-link fences
but on endless green,
and you are smiling.

KS Palakovic is a queer disabled princess born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario—the city of waterfalls and steel. She currently lives out in the Canadian countryside among fields of snow and a growing collection of journals that no one is allowed to read (yet).