Windows in Belleville
Past midnight, and the shutters apart:
a boy runs with his dog on the pavement,
a moped splits open the street.
Yesterday afternoon, at a sill in the opposite block,
a girl knelt with her chin on the dish
of her backwards-bent wrists
and stared at me squarely, unsmiling,
across the hot road’s width.
Now where she knelt, a curtain trails its hem.
In the window above, unsheathed by shutters
or net, an Anglepoise struts in its own
bony light; below, in white pants,
a man turns and turns before his reflection,
the bees of his small, midnight miseries
circling him, swarming the glass.
(First published in issue 31 of The Moth)