“The City, 2” by Yvonne Blomer
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “The City, 2” by Yvonne Blomer.
The City, 2
By Yvonne Blomer
On city streets and under soaring skyscrapers
graffiti sews the city.
What is a city?
Dark paths. A woman walks
not watching, not watching
she knows in her bones the way—
A woman walks. She walks from garden
through her own history—
passes the great cities, villages, festivals,
arches, aching to collapse under old brick.
A city is loud voices, playgrounds,
the Italian cheese shop, the bodega
tucked down a sky-lit alley.
A woman walks. She’s walking herself home.
A city is a woman tattooed in streetlights
and moody nights. Hidden spaces,
forgotten bones, graves, grains, faces.
A city moves in wind—
fried food at the pier, and boats full
of fish guts.
Mallards and pigeons in the city’s squares and a city’s
urban trees: maples, ash, linden.
Alleys form in the structure of trees, in the shape
of roots, hollowed trunks
like underground tunnels and hiding spaces.
A city is ancient. Indigenous.
Waterways, deep ghosting
creeks and rivers. Damned,
a city rivers itself from sunrise to light—
streaked night where car headlights
mark the terrain in red smears
and ghostly diving shapes.
Copyright © Yvonne Blomer
Forthcoming in Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press 2024)
Yvonne Blomer is a past poet laureate of Victoria, BC and the 2022-2023 Arc poetry magazines poet-in-residence. Her sixth book of poetry, “Death of Persephone: A Murder” is forthcoming in the fall of 2024. She lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. Yvonne is currently accepting poems on the theme of ice for a third water-based poetry anthology, details at Caitlin Press, deadline June 20, 2024
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