Schmaltz & Kvetch
These two poems were written in collaboration with one another and are based on the city of Durham.
Schmaltz
Alexander Cohen
“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
- Exodus (22:21)
A schmaltz remembrance:
sand in the train’s rattling eye
I see the viaduct exhale
on another Thursday night where
warm light hums and soft faces redden
untensed, when each house is at its last breath
and the end emerges with the horizon,
when pens drop and building stops
their grip and up goes the
bottle to lip and kiss and soul
unencumbered with each sip.
The lights are not dotted like stars
that would be too holy
and would miss the dirt amassing
on dinner plates, dusty floors
beyond the glass that too demands
a response. Usually the other cheek,
but even that requires recognition
and it has been another long week.
It is a loving dirt that smiles
the mark of living poetically and dwelling
with a past that no longer aches.
But nobody beneath the glow can see
for they are always within and
turning and turning under the light
only knowing warmth and not the night.
Neither can I take my eyes off of certain windows
there are heavy bags beneath that anchor
them pulling my gaze
toward their remembered view.
I never sojourned there
I never sojourned there
and so I do not remain.
Kvetch
Emily Oliver
it’s shitty but it’s pretty how
a city that was once
dead ends,
unknowable geographic bends
and brick walls,
becomes alive and sentient
with streets like veins
and the graffiti of the life we’ve lived
leaves no concrete blank or dead.
our detritus flutters unphased
caught in whirlpools by the wind;
receipts accumulate with love letters,
behind the bus stop
and in the busker’s open guitar case.
empty pizza boxes like broken hearts
lie grease-stained in alleyways,
and anyways, what’s the past?
how many people died building the cathedral?
how many people have cried over a missed phone call?
unread text messages stand monument
to fatalistic human endeavour.
windows watch like faces
when you know what was once behind them, what still is.
it’s shit, how a certain pavement slab can make you want to throw up,
how you can’t keep your eyes from certain windows
in certain apartment complexes
on a certain bridge
with a certain drop.
how many times, when your phone rings,
do you slide it with your foot into the gutter of your mind and watch the rainwater bear it away?
is that ok?
it’s shitty but it’s pretty how
you’ve infested the veins of this city with your happy cancer
and now you won’t answer
my calls.
Illustrated by Tula Wild.
Illustrated by Maja Kobylak.