Unfair™ — 2020 — Westergas, Amsterdam

Everything that can happen in a day often does

 When the streets start to hum in the morning

  Car engines rattle newborns awake

   A crowd crosses, each set of shoes clacking in their own symphony

    When panels of panes

     Reveal a gridlocked interior landscape

      And movement like a moment,

       Slow like a golden hue drips in reverse back to blue

        When sunset is a shuttered dawn

         And a surface is anything but

          When rain falls from a swollen sky

           Forming a puddle, a pool,

            A portal to another place

             When a faded lipstick kiss stains a martini glass rim

              While birds are cooing and queueing, catching fireflies

               And bicycles churn around corners,

                While somewhere on the 3rd floor of a pre-war apartment

                 Fruit rots in a bowl,

                  A cell phone rings until reaching a full voicemail box

                   A belly gurgles with evening hunger

                    While a relic of religion crumbles

                     Into the space between us

                      And money changes hands

                       Ice melts

                        Salt compliments pepper

                         A mother whispers

                         While the leaf of a potted plant unfurls

                          Bugs kiss in the grass

                           An opportunity slips away

                            Two people argue over dinner, then hug and make up

                             But still sleep on different sides of the bed

                              A light flickers on and off,

                               In the distance, the life size shadow of a body appears

                                Look now, before it’s gone

                                 Everything that can happen in a day often does

                                  And does again and again and again

poem by

 Vanessa Kowalski