Maja Lukic

this is a bare side street with a suspicious broken up sky the neighborhood by turns too dark and too lit

neon miasma, black trees, blue air people stare out of their windows down the avenue all my neighbors in their containers wait all the faces are still there

but rearranged in fear it’s been years since I’ve recognized terror it was cold last night on the park bench when a friend and I stepped out with bicycles and cans of Pinot Noir we tried to map out the new year of curfews and vaccines (how long will I have to be alone?) a week, a month, two or more; it eats, it grows it is time it were time, Celan said

it is time in quarantine I only ever move through time but not space the rotating planetary days the light cutting a path through the windows over the ceiling, skimming the blanket where I miss an old lover

I take my place by the window watch the street precarious

no one comes by so I water the plants and read Eliot— I can connect / nothing with nothing I would sleep but sleep has dried away and only a fugue state of powders and pills brings not rest but a greater stillness life now—sequenced stillnesses and silences discernible only to the one who hardly ever moves except for walks in the park where I hear a little boy complain to his parents about a fence: why did they even put a fence there? it separates nothing from nothing me and the street I don’t enter