Rented Rooms

The house is boiled cabbage goose fat, gizzard stew, and beets. Windows steam and simmer, you can write your name on the glass winter or summer. If you can live among rutabaga or borscht; if pickled eggs haunt your palate then this house becomes air in your lungs. The landlady was Polish or Russian; she spoke with a burly churlish tongue, she moved like a Turk, her walking cane was a scimitar. She supped a tarry tea from a Serbian samovar. We shared a toilet with a slim man who was slinky and still in the closet, he would saucily wink over strong drink. His lips were rosy not pink. He washed argyle socks in the kitchen sink. There were others, they left early riding pushbikes into the grey streets. The lady groused, patrolled perimeters, barged prying hands into private matters. Hairclips and rubber bands fell from her curlers as forewarnings and threats. The Bulgarian or Croatian crone had broad bad hips and liked me not for back then I used a substance to ease my mind. I would smoke in the shared toilet leaning my thin mouth through a small slanty window, she absolutely knew, and threw passing daggers with tightly curled Estonian lips. We stayed like that for months until the city regurgitated our lives once more. Once more seeking low rent rooms, from those cosmopolitan guardians of small city spaces.