Night City

“But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark …”
—Li-Young Lee

1.

Second shift. The night drags. Half-burnt lights flicker like an unbraided nerve.

Hunched over the day’s embers, we gash through stories, mired in our secret wells of paranoia & dreams.

We hold the tattered edges of the city’s story.

We warm ourselves by its fire. The city is burning. The presses are burning.

Bleary, insomniac, we step into the shadowed streets.



2.

Across a thousand miles of prairie, the city called me.

Over the spray and roar of tide pools, over the slate-gray gleam of the Pacific, the city called me.

I flew over the mountains. I flew through the flatlands. I flew through sunflower fields, turning their eerie golden heads towards the sun.

At the gates of the city, I bowed my head. I rolled river mud between my fingers.

3.

At night, we leave our tiny huddle of warmth, roam the abandoned floors, chasing ghosts.

This building once bursting with people & stories.

The long line at the cashier, when the paper boys and girls came in to pay up. All laughter and nerves with the clerks.

Barely a free desk on any floor. In the newsroom. In classifieds. In complaints, where the desks filled quickly on Sunday mornings.

O, the meetings. O, the gossip. O, the talks with young employees about saving each subscription.

4.

The skyways,
the skyways,
the hanging gardens of my adolescence.

The burbling fountains, the bubble of life, sharp teenage thrills and blunders under bright winter skylights.

When a trip downtown, was a trip downtown,
to the squeaky tightness of the optician,
to the jackalopes and dinosaur bones at the old Science Museum.

5.

Pockets of life flare in the ashes.

Gilded storefronts. Marble arches tucked inside abandoned buildings. Hidden rooms full of noise and light. The Art Deco swoop of gold inside City Hall.

Outside the faded St. Paul Club, a burst of conversation spills from the second-story ballroom. A woman’s voice — grit and honey, a jazz scat full of hooks and tremulos, a coffee-ground soprano — soars out the window, into the sultry July night.

6.

Floor by floor, the city empties.

The gardens abandoned, the fountains choked. The glass atrium cracked, corroded.

The Art Deco storefronts, leaded glass and rich, red awnings, boarded up. Black boards yawn where windows should open.

The railyards gone. The stockyards gone. The barges battered listless on the river's swells.

The department store gone. The antique dealers gone.

Rats abandon the abandoned alleys.

7.

Keep your head down. Don’t meet each other’s eyes. Survivors.

Leaving work at midnight, I hurry past abandoned storefronts. Afraid the grime of failure — filmy storefront windows, abandoned display ads — will snag me.

Afraid the homeless men lingering outside the Hunan Garden will call out to me.

Afraid the two men emptying the construction dumpster in the dark will jackal me.

I walk the streets at midnight. Hear the city’s death rattle: wind riffling cellophane bags, the distant snarl of semis. Rub grit from my eyes.

In ten shadowed blocks, the only moving thing is the caramel corn man.

Spill of laughter. On the spring wind: Butter and burnt sugar.

--Trisha Collopy