The City
By Roberta Lawson


We call it a city because no one is really certain whether it is a town or not. We expect it is so large it must be a city. Nobody is definite where (or if) it begins or ends. There is rumoured to be a cathedral, somewhere. Some say it is just a large chapel.

No one really knows how old the city is. Perhaps beginnings are not relevant. Most of us do not remember when we got here. Sometimes, I think it is the pollution that makes it so hard to leave: presses down upon us like a gas mask, like a blanket, like a lover, like a hug: keeps us here, submerged.

On drizzling nights, when we shiver in too-thin coats, oil bleeding lazy rainbows into flooding gutters, I dream I see a moat. Lapping around the city’s outskirts; dark grey water, deep and murky, heads of turtles peeking out for occasional breath. On brighter days, it is just a river. Sometimes a puddle.

We all came here for the same basic reason: we were all running from something. Mostly ourselves.

This is a city you fall into running.

There are mosaics in desolate alleyways, and giddy neon noodle bars where the chefs are always screaming.

There are rats scurrying in gutters and girls in metallic colours.

Strains of jazz carry in 2 a.m. exhaust fumes. There are cigar butts on the pavements, and emeralds in the sewers.

On the corner an old man with a hacking cough and a checked scarf is dying tonight. Three feet away, a dark-haired girl with a fringe and a tiny copper skirt presses her drunk hips to her new boyfriend.

A taxi driver is swearing and his tires are skidding

A grey-hooded sixteen-year-old sprays a bridge sixty feet high; red, green, purple. It drips: ‘Fuck you.’

Around another corner, four serious-faced businessmen play poker. In a backroom, a greasy yellow-haired man fucks a woman he is paying for the pleasure. No one is sure where she sprung from, or if she has a name. Her back hurts.

Two doors away, a make-believe countess sips Earl Grey from the leaf, and lays the tarot, Rachmaninoff subdued and echoing off her high ceiling.

Outside, a yowling cat curls up with its kittens and begins to paw at the pavestones.

Roberta Lawson is twenty five years old, originally from London, and now lives on the South Coast of England. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Sein Und Werden, Eviscerator Heaven, The Clockwise Cat, Zygotein My Coffee, and Counterexample Poetics. You can find superfluous detail about her and read more of her writing at her blog: http://mermaids-singing.blogspot.com.

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