By Zoe Gungon
The city is too alive at this time of night
Cigarette smoke businessman’s cologne burning
waft by my spot in the shadows
I’m lying on the ground again
It’s cold past midnight, but I don’t mind
Farther from the lights, the better
All you left me with, that is
In those lights, I remember
little traces of something
I want to forget,
all those times where allI could do was watch you leave,
again and again and again
/
I need you to tell me what to do,
life lived as a separation
You can’t leave me like this,
in your aftermath
This blood, aching to be the only reason I’m alive;
We’re blood and I’m nothing and all of this is your fault
Wound I am yet to heal,
the father-shaped hole inside me
What would you say if you saw me like this?
Perhaps that is my issue,
concerned more with the mess
than if the wound still bleeds
It pools by my feet,
the realization,
shirt ink stained by the time I get home
/
Raindrops on my face,
an echoed past collects itself
amidst the downpour
damp to the touch
mark of absence
on quivering skin, yet
it is the broken little thing
that falls apart in my hand
while I stay standing
/
The city, alive and humming
with excess of energy,
as sun falls on the skyline
All the bright lights
and I have never felt more alive
Zoe Gungon is a juniorin high school. Her work often containsthemes of memory and the
retrospective. She has previously been published in Hot Pot Magazine, with the poem “A Lover’s Brew”
in issue two.
Hot Pot Magazine 