Hot Pot Magazine

By Erin Clark

- In 2014 I traveled to Berlin for the first time alone, without my German partner who had lived
there for some years, to soak up the city on my own terms.


1. Two weeks later

Back in England,
at breakfast:

You call that
‘bread’?

Mid-mouthful
of cold toast,

the phone rings —
a foreign number.

I answer
the call

stating only
my short name,

which hadn’t sounded
German ’til now.

It’s no use greeting
the unknown

without
morgenbrot.


2. Five weeks

I imagine Angela Merkel
as my great-grandmother.
             (My real one was a stoic cackler
             with a teutonic name: Gertrude.)

The BBC has an amusing spin
on Urgroßmutti’s policies.
             (Gertrude opened her house
             to all the waifs and strays, too.)

(Gertrude sold vitamins to her neighbours
in brown glass bottles.)
             Urgroßmutti is a chemist whose nation is built
             on the work of postwar pharmaceuticals.

(At Christmas, Easter and New Year, Gertrude
brought the whole family to Our Redeemer Lutheran.)
             Urgroßmutti attends EKD midnight mass
             saying blue-eyed goodbyes to the days between the years.


3. Fourteen weeks

Weekly on a Wednesday, each third workaday hour,              the echo of the S-Bahn train
             flits across the brain, then steals away,
                                                                                           once again is buried in stacks of Bücher.

I didn’t ask for such benign hauntings
                                                                              but got them anyway: hooks of ambient sound,
                                                                                           desperate earworms burrowed deep.

They rain brings them out, though
             I don’t know why:                                        my Berlin days weren’t wet
but tawdry-hot with summer
                                                                              concrete radiating bodies’

                                                                                                                                  celestial heat.


4. Five and half months

Having left Berlin, when I squeeze shut my eyes
             and press the present grey away and hope a kaleidoscope of more:

I feel the shocking azure of the sky behind
             the Bauhaus Archiv, the mustard of Kottbusser Tor,

Socialism’s faded red, the Tierpark’s viriditas,
             and everywhere the electric white

of a city always telling forth its night,
             couching joy in calm analysis, good plumbing, graffitied doors.


5. Eight months

Especially bad bleeding this month when I cut
             myself on a new knife whilst crying
                          chopping onions for hackepeter I won’t eat.

My Berliners are coming. They’re staying
             in my student rooms, on my brick-lined street,
                          in my town with its own fascist columns vying

for importance next to mediaeval conceits.
             Bandage on, purpose recalled, tears drying,
                          I return to preparing their onions and meat.

Erin Clark is a queer American writer and priest living and working in London, England. Her poems, essays and stories can be found in places such as About Place, The Scores, Mash, Geez and The Merton Journal. She is online at @e_m_clark on Twitter and emclark.co.