Enterprising
I was lying in bed when I first heard it.
A woman shouting at the top of her voice.
In German. She had a strange Bavarian dialect.
I got up and went to the sill, looked down the 4 stories.
At first I saw her partner. A bent smallish figure without a face
or hands (his hands
were buried in his pockets, his face drawn
up in his hood)
It was as if he had crawled up into his clothes
to escape his woman's endless
raving. She started yelling somewhere around the foot
of the Straße and continued as they passed the fruit
stand, the Turkish Internet Cafe, the kneipe with the crooked
neon Warsteiner sign,
a few drunks turning on their stools to see what it was about.
Her voice
was deep yet velvety, like an opera singer's.
It seemed to glide angrily up
the cobblestones and along the sides of the buildings,
the various open windows
and sewer grates and corridors drinking it in. She was still roaring
when she reached
the Landwerkanal, but I don't think
her companion could hear a thing, being
so sucked up and protected in his shell of clothing.
It didn't matter
anyway.
In the end, there was really only one person
she was yelling
at and that
was herself.
___
The Writer: M.P. Powers is an American ex-pat living in Berlin, Germany. His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Menacing Hedge, The Foundling Review, Rosebud, Existere, Stone Highway Review and many other fine places. More info here: www.nyqpoets.net/poet/mppowers
The Artist: Katrina Pallop is a playwright, photographer, and actress based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her photographs have been published by a number of independent magazines, among them The 2River View, Calyx, and OVS. Her online portfolio can be found here.
