‘Goulash, Prague’ by Lauren Gallagher. IG: @boykeats
Joshua Calladine-Jones
___________________________________________________________________
vltava polaroid #03
A room a vacancy:
the change in the tupperware, the ashtray,
the cubicle (unlatched)
and her hobbling towards us.
.
What happened was we got punched:
a right-hook to the jaw, a handful
of flung cake this was nothing
to celebrate.
.
She cursed us, spat onlookers
must’ve filmed it all: screen-lights
glaring and (what choice?) we left.
We stopped gawped at,
.
then perched on a bench far
from the metro-mouth, where
we photographed this sight-same water
after the year had elapsed.
.
This river is a limit. In centuries
it hasn’t changed direction. Impossible
to imagine the certainty
of that ceaseless course.
.
Outside the cloister two sisters,
aloof to haggard strangers pass
an ATM glamourless
with its pixelated face.
.
And hate? No now black points
emerge on the image, immune to needling
light. We thumb these bruises
as currents move within.
.
prague, spring
A man, thin-on-top and youngish in a bloodied
T-shirt and a woman behind
traverse the patch of fresh cement and spring
is here again.
.
She has no pants, only stilettos and a most-
revealing harness, as she teeters,
keeping pace with the promenading male.
The day’s clear
.
as light, or as wind. They seem to be in costume.
She wears a surgeon’s mask,
but he doesn’t. All things contain their opposite.
She is all
.
in black, a good head or so taller than her lover
(lover? stranger? ally? friend?)
and they stamp and tremble on without a trace
of shame,
.
(a lack of clothes isn’t pride or shame, it only is)
naked, or almost naked,
in the light of March, unseen by anyone
but us:
.
our half-a-quarter-form at three o’clock, leering
from the office glass,
and a long steady wondering at the growing stain,
at the blood.
___________________________________________________________________
Joshua Calladine-Jones is a poet and the literary-critic in-residence at Festival spisovatelů Praha. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Stinging Fly, 3:AM, The Anarchist Library, Minor Literature[s], The Hong Kong Review of Books, and Literární.cz. His pamphlet Constructions [Konstrukce] was published by tall-lighthouse in 2021, and Reconstructions [Rekonstrukce], will be published in 2022.
IG: @urneburiall
Beyond the Underground 