People Build Walls in Rome at Night

By Ann Gong

Category: Poetry

We found her in a parking lot somewhere in the maze of nighttime Rome,
Where the dust settles yellow during summers, which roll in with people
From all over, TOURIST written in white on the back.
She was no tourist, this pasty angel with mascara smothering her eyes.
They were bruised arms, the bared French bread limbs that hung
Softly against her angles. Her netted legs were black and blue.

We looked at her, but her face only backlit blue
Before blending back into the brick monotony of Rome.
She could see nothing, not even the street lamps hung
From the sky like falling stars, burning shadows into the people
That danced the twisted streets; watching like eyes
Through a windowpane; following white capped heads back

Into when the half goat played the pan pipes, his back
Carpeted in a shaggy rug. If my mother had seen this lost blue
Girl, she would have hissed to not look into her eyes,
As if those pale fingernails with chipped black color, like the sewers of Rome,
Could do us more harm than the twittering rats. Into the sea of people,
We could vanish like wind whispering through bodies hung

Ages ago, so we avoided her and her hair that hung
In sullied platinum ringlets. As we passed, we looked back;
She had become a shadow between the silent Smart Cars of people
Stranded elsewhere under the clandestine blue.
Her image stumbled between us; our footsteps in Rome
Seemed to slow the cobblestones in our eyes.

Maybe all she could see that night were eyes—
That stared, that judged, that jeered and hung
Her dignity. She belonged in Rome,
With its reckless streets of roaming girls in the back
Of warehouses along the harbor, where sailors knocked them blue.
She knew people

Better than they knew themselves, these people
Whose drunken laughs littered the face of the city, in which eyes
Lingered as much as feet. They would never ponder the blue
In her quiet bruises and rough thread tatters that hung
Off her shoulders like wings, and they would never go back
To wonder when she had first tread, as a smiling child, on the shores of Rome.

As if we had TOURIST stamped blue on our foreheads, we trample Rome
With people who know not to turn back
And look into the eyes of dolls that the angels hung