Tom Laichas
Metropolis
Mine is a city of trees but not a city of orchards. Fruit hangs over a neighbor’s wall but this is not a city of fruit-gatherers or of baskets full of fruit, or of a tree’s cool shade and shadow.
Mine is a city of bees, in lantana and lavender, but not of honey or hive-keepers. Mine is not a city of rain.
Because this is a city, there are neighbors, but faces are rarely familiar. Eyes are heavily lidded, hands folded in laps. Mine is a city of birds, not of flocks, a city of tides empty of driftwood.
Mine is a city of windows layered, pane on pane, against outdoor sound and speech. It is a city of sodium streetlights, of a zenith’s starless hush. Mine is a city of trees, their leaves lit green at every dark hour.
Mine is a named city. Printed on its map, still more names, names for every neighborhood, every street. In our city, no one remembers these names. A strange aphasia.
Who can live like this, in a city of ten million rooms? We do.
How can we live without at least greeting these neighbors? Somehow, we live.
Mine is a country of cities, a country of conversations without endearments. Where else would we live? And what name would we give to that other place?
Tom Laichas is the author most recently of the poetry collection Three Hundred Streets of Venice California (FutureCycle Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in Altadena Poetry Review, Does It Have Pockets, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Eclectica, Plume, and other journals. He lives in Venice, California.
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