Poetry by Zadie McGrath

It’s not like a city wants to be a city anyway

it is the memory coming back : a basilisk unfolding

in the trenches of the earth, how we bend

around a word : an incantation.

see : night has polluted to pastels

we want to make a city on the moon see :

we stargaze already

for satellites.

it’s not like a city : wants to be a city anyway.

we take the sea

where we can get it,

ocean-scraped leavings and the roadside

is pedestrian is a storm victim see :

this city a feat

a freak : of nature.

i tried to write a fury poem and instead i wrote overwhelm and the hum of the air by the roadside.

i burned my hair on six hours sleep and it should’ve been enough.

i would go away, i said, guilty.

i sat roadside on the least road a road could be,

dug through landfill just to see :

retina on screen,

see : sand billowing

onto the concrete overstory,

the back end of things,

the basilisk unfolding

in subway tunnels, in charted ocean.

i met the basilisk seaside, roadside and it told me

see : you defy yourself.