DECEMBER 19TH - ERIN O'MALLEY
How can I be homesick
when I am sick of my own country
that so often makes me clutch
the hand of someone
here, my host family and their neighborhood
of snow. It’s not colder
in this country, but the pale
of winter lasts
into the months I know
to be spring. Nights like these stare, long
into a moon so waxen, I see myself staring
back, or maybe it’s only some pitchblack shadow,
a reminder of myself. The hair
on my bathroom floor, unlit
matches. I know how I was made and how I can be
unmade: a slant/ of flame and oxygen, collision. When the truck crashed
into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz, I cried
at how much the sound/ of sirens reminded me
of home.
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