If I look at my last night in the city like a photograph

By Blossom Hibbert

As today’s newspaper becomes yesterday’s, the butcher’s daughter examines her small breasts in a mirror.
 
Bitter flakes of memory falling outside my front window.  Guilt. Look’it! Something inside the postbox. Between the ceiling and the desk. A typewriter—plain as day.
 
The girl in the picture wears a fringe and ginger kitten on her chest. Drenched in olive boots. An empty bottle of maroon wine dribbles all over her tartan lungs. Well then, shall we begin? Behind the door sits the shadow of a shy gentleman in round glasses. Brewing coffee under his motorbike helmet. For you—honey. Midnight bells. Good falsetto. Look up and see them all. Unconscious and bundled up in the place where buses sleep.
 
One row of dry trees with their belts undone and there sleeps a lonely pharmacist in cowboy boots. The pink sky of bacterial meningitis seeps from above, causing the photograph to look nice. In the American German colony, I spot a bad piano lesson coming to its natural end. Ranch houses and duck legs stuffed into tents for the homeless. So, I am taking your word for it? The unnatural whiteness of the moon (which is the child’s tooth) quivers in the inky attic. Thick animal skin lines this very pavement I have danced along for months on end—ever since the beginning of time. I know it will not last forever, but this does not stop my night from trying. Right. Do I live in a foreign city?
 
A pair of quick and tanned French arms pull sucking babies from swollen nipples. Unearned money lines fat pockets. Feet splash splosh along Derech Jaffo from my house to my lover’s house. But, feet do not know a damn thing about the world’s sexual history. Men in prayer shawls pretend to be seagulls & flock down Allenby, searching for a wooden synagogue and their half-true prayer. I can see Halper in that top right archway, reaching for the remote to switch his CD player off.
 
Teddy Wilson is crying because he does not want to go to bed. The bookseller’s home wears a top hat and smokes a thick pipe, most likely. Will you give me your shoulder from last Friday? Little charming kiddush girl.
 
Meanwhile. Victor—pale & naked, is out there somewhere too, you know—inside a magnificent building, dancing his premiere in front of 200 dead panthers while Kitten, sleepy eyed and glamorous, purrs on my chest without looking over the edge. I like the way this photograph feels between my fingers. I like Lydia on Ben Gamliel street eating six boiled eggs dipped in salt and tahini, reading professional articles on childhood psychology. I like milk crates being stacked by a surfer with an ugly dog. Rain drops in stone columns for the outstanding finale. I like all the ordinary people: uprising, protesting, arguing, growing and shrinking, stretching and drinking—all on top of one another, humping on marble kitchen tables. I can see their voices trying to get out, like a frightened rat criss-crossing an open coastline. All the while, I must never take my eyes off the city's soft & white exposed neck.
 
The photograph is just a framed carcass.
Seasick and violent, I lean over the corner of my seat.
 
When I blink and re-open my eyes, the photograph is washed with suds of thunder, and—although I can recall every stone in my mind's picture box, I am unable to paint a single centimetre of it. Ain't that strange? No sir (he says)—this is a non-smoking bar. We don’t permit liars. Or dogs. The man reeks of loneliness and onions. He sticks the poodle behind the bar when the shot is taken, and tells the truth about the softness of his pillow. I remove the dark by lighting a shabbat candle.
 
To batter the city senseless is my desire. After smoking an entire punnet of brown tobacco in Ido’s moving van under a white tongue. We could just walk to Bethlehem, you know. A quiet burial for my neighborhood now please—no fuss. Just friends playing backgammon with a cup of tea in the shuk.
 
Could be rather nice, no? A blue corn maze flashes across the photograph. It is the last thing you notice. Dear city, do you prefer mummy, or daddy more?
 
We need to stick out our thumb on the highway and find a doctor for my foreign sickness. The latest fashionable coat begins slipping off coathangers. You are still afraid? I poke the eight sticky Rugulach from Jerusalem into my open gob. Little brown fingerprint on the photograph. A few cashews too, catching them like a tennis ball. The grocery boy throws himself off a bridge after lifting the rug on his cheating woman. She is frozen, flinching against the delivery boy’s palm. Kitten does not wake to the thud.
 
Kitten does not know I am leaving tomorrow on a flashy white airplane. Kitten only knows that when he is hungry, it sounds exactly like the polite tread of a woman in olive boots.
 
I put the photograph back in the letterbox, and leave the kitten out in the wind and rain to slowly fade away.

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​Blossom Hibbert has a pamphlet, suddenly, it’s now, published by Leafe Press. Her work has appeared in places such as Litter, International Times and Buttonhook Press. She currently resides in Albania, changing hostel bed sheets and hiding the lost and found items under her pillow.