Photo by Joel Filipe on UnsplashZ

Be-longing

I belong with empty cities at night
where my shadow hides from the lights,
from the occasional stranger,
from its own invisible face.

I fell in love with this city through your eyes
and from the back of taxi cabs.

My heart belongs on top of rooftops
where my body lives between
natural and artificial lights;
where my body trembles at every person
hiding inside of the poorly made buildings.

I exist within the people that don’t want me there,
and within the people that do want me there
because we care about each other more than we know.

I belong with my body
and somehow don’t belong with it at all.

I learn to love my insides
while I rot and decay and get confused at
what is happening.

Why do I need pills to function normal?

Sometimes, I belong in forests and oceans,
too.
And cities and people’s arms and other places
kind enough to swallow me whole.

i

my heart bleeds
as i ride the bUs
and someone whispers in my ear
that make-believe is hyper-real
and that is hyper-trUe
since i know no reality and only live in projections;
the stitches are never enoUgh
but i pick at them
and everyone tells me to stop
bUt my fingers re-imagine them as gUitar strings
i mean heart-strings
whatever that means
bUt there’s never mUsic;
i jUst notice that
time is wasted and all spaces are wrong
so don’t ask me how i know
becaUse i don’t i jUst sUppose
and i propose
we never go home again;
and i never go home again;
we jUst live in city lights and ignore the aching
of whatever the fUck being a stranger means

Zlatitsa Markova is an aspiring poet, a Bulgarian and a current second year English and Creative Writing student at the University of Birmingham. She has been published in the online MARS anthology-zine and in the ‘Night’ journal published by the Writers’ Bloc society at UoB. Her interests include travelling, New York poets and going out of her comfort zone. She blogs at www.wordsofpindorela.wordpress.com.