Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Overlooking the City  
Matthew Siegel

The city lights up one kitchen
at a time. A woman sits by me,

I can smell the mint on her breath, it mingles
with the colors bleeding into, out of the sky.

I’m not sick, sitting here in the twisted tower
of the DeYoung Museum.

Thank God for beauty without barbed hooks,
without needing her hands.

No, I am not hurting in this moment.
I am memory’s lips sewn shut.

The sky is pink now, red in some places
and the red does not remind me of blood.

I do not see it on the cars, the woman’s lips.
It does not hurt, finally, the sun’s rays

reaching out all around, almost reaching
even me, surrounded here and alone

in this tower overlooking the city
in which I am trying to live.

 

Matthew Siegel is a poet and essay writer from New York. A recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has poems and essays appearing or are forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Indiana Review, The Lumberyard, Lo-Ball, Mid-American Review, TheRumpus.net and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco.