Battlefield 2 Ultra High

Warsaw, a poem by Ana Pérez Cañamares

(Prozna Street. He was part of the Warsaw ghetto.)
WARSAW

I'm having a beer in front of what once was your home.
Now your house is a symbol and
symbols are not habitable.
For you must have
it would never stop being
houses:
clatter of dishes bursting laughter


sheets stretched to project the sun's evening movie:
a film about happiness or at least

safety of a shelter. Shelter
transfer and the street noise never
horror.
Through the curtains
the horror is not assumed.

I tell stories.
soldiers throwing children through the windows. Soldiers

cutting beards and sideburns with a razor, in the street carnival of humiliation.
I tell stories, but your house does not seem owned
hell.
is old, yes, and there is a bullet hole under a ledge
as fingerprints of God to sink into mud
solid.
pointing to the chosen or damned.
Nevertheless, like all the houses, some still

of tender and impregnable.

I'm drinking a beer.
not my health or yours.
What can I say about you?
memories of you I have
and I feel shame to imagine.
I have memory of mankind. Even
I have. And I have also a house.
I remember now: the dishes
sheets, curtains,

treasures betray me as deluded owner.

A reinforced door: the pit

that no army has been tested.

But

or beyond
house is a place. A place you want to share

even want to invade
although not a territory or a ruin.
is the place to
escaped a second before the door was torn down
. Or a second later.
When you realized that the houses might seem a universe

but not even a country.
And a cry in another language opens wide
windows
being dismissed on the street like vomit.

houses poorly digested violence of strangers.

has to be a place.
The place I do not reveal your photo.
The place
destroy others with words or with bombs. Rat
there does not mean anything. The pain can cloud

but not wall.
is the ghetto we raise
within us.
The tomb that we choose to occupy.
Not what we say.

The bunker inside you.

ANA PÉREZ Cañamares

anapmares@gmail.com