David Huntington is managing web editor at SpittoonCollective.com. His work is published or forthcoming in the likes of Spittoon Literary Magazine, Literary Hub, and Post Road; his screenplay ‘New Violence’ was selected for the 2018 Middlebury Script Lab.
I’d left my city open that night
and when I woke I closed it.
I tidied my pages
and crossed the streets.
The beggars took their corners.
My students looked down the long halls.
From my tower
I could hear the summation
and a tin-like hammer near Xujiahui.
I went to the sculpture park and read a book
among the statues I didn’t know what to do.
It took only one rain to shed summer.
The streets became numb and increased their tension.
At the intersections it was always as if
one of those raincoats cupped a pearl.
I walked over my city, over and over it.
Its towers grew taller every day.
Because I wore gloves I dropped my phone
it broke on the glassy street—
the rain drove the heat down into the belly.
Turned around as I stepped off the subway
all my roads slick black and the faces like lamps
beneath their umbrellas—
It seemed the traffic might never move again.
She met me in a small brown bar.