Du Hast Mich

By: Benjamin Rose

En route, the traffic was suddenly thin

Down Mass and the bridge to Embassy Row.

We passed the Turkish government-run mosque,

Passed the statues of Nelson Mandela

And Winston Churchill in bronze and in stone

Or whatever stuff from whence they were raised

I cannot guess, and said nothing at all.

I scrolled the driver’s bio half-asleep.

By accident, Rammstein began to play.

My shoulder swam in your umbrageous curls

That once electrified. Now, as though numb,

The beat of your heart was nothing to me.

The scent of your fragrance, once ecstatic

As Hart Crane’s lunatic chants in my blood

(And just as daubed in wild overstatement)

Nauseated, laden with saccharine.

These days we say little, and fuck still less,

And swallow our remarks, though not so old,

Long grown bitter and anemic with strife,

Acerbic with spite unbridled and cold

In our contempt—though the empty bedroom

As we near thirty is no life at all;

A bad peace, and far more wretched than war,

A night’s waste in wan but tolerant arms.

In the distance, a fruitless siren raged

Shrill to the scene of some local gunplay,

Or so I presumed, as evening streetlights

Cast upon the arbors their amber veils

Indifferently. All the romance wherein

Our rapt lips merged under shadowy leaves

On a warm night by the Alban Towers There,

three summers ago, was extinguished.

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Benjamin Rose is a poet born and raised in the D.C. area and the author of The Road Of Glass and Gardens And Graves. His work has appeared in The Dillydoun Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and Cathexis Northwest Press. He studies English Literature at the Catholic University of America (Class of 2023) and started studying Urdu in 2022.