Small City by Nathan Bateman

Small City

How I’d love to fall in love with you and see the city on a tandem bike (I can’t bike, you’ll have to help me). I like the way you smile, and the way you look when you smoke a cigarette with heart shaped sunglasses on; I like the way I dream about you—the small moments a broken puzzle between big moments, a rolling haze over the wharf, so busy with workers that look as ants from the top of the hill. Dreaming—gladly would I take death dreaming—about you I see why Rilke wrote so much about angels; all men are little poets, the curve of a woman’s chest just before it sloped into the breast reduced Burke to tears—gardens are women, too; so dreaming I think about secret kisses, and Troy, and the courage of a wave seizing toward the shoreline.

If this frail shell, wretched carcass called body, could move I’d move toward you and bother you while you serve customers at the liquor store; I’d find you in the library, by coincidence of course, and ask what you’re reading; I’d be friends with your friends and you’d be friends with me; I’d show you Rocky I and Lethal Weapon; you’d show me something I’ve never heard of—Ants by Giuseppe Andrews—and that night, with its whiskey on the rocks and potato chips and spliffs, would become my favourite night; our polaroid selfie pinned to the cork board.