Swallows

sitting in a bar on Rue Lepic with a glass of cheap pastis. the water hits the liquor and turns it cloudy; a yellow, curdled swirl. it tastes heavy—fennel, aniseed, a bitter medicine that catches the back of the throat.

it hits the same way an old road hits your boots when you’ve tramped it past the point of caring. just a grinding ache. I scribble a few lines about this place in my notebook—the stone apartments look like teeth rotting out of the city’s jaw. the tap behind the bar drips slow. a flat, tinny ticking. it bounces inside my head like a hammer hitting an anvil, every drop just grease leaking into the floorboards.

the waitress keeps her eye on the level in my glass, splashes more water in without asking. she takes the crumpled notes with a chapped hand—businesslike, the way people get when the streetlamps click on, and the frost starts coming up through the pavement. no one looks at the empty tables.

I watch through the window.

outside, the swallows cut low through the alley, dodging the power lines, heading back

to the dried mud nests glued under the concrete eaves. right past the door of the alley brothel. a girl in a faded floral skirt steps out into the dusk. she stands on the cobbles, checking her watch, her skirt moving slightly in the draft from the metro grate. a low, cheap migration across the stones of Montmartre.

swallows to the mud,
faded skirt against the stone,
no one home but me.