I/ Self/ Woman in Berlin
1930
If you ask me later if I knew
the city scattered its sequins
like starlight over the floors
of the clubs, if the city swallowed
death like the crescent of a melon,
if the city coughed out coal
powder in the swirling eddies
of the sky—the sunset like ostrich
feathers framing the face
of a movie star—I would say
no, no, but if you ask me
if I negotiated my wages
so my fingertips would not touch
the trolley floor when I dropped
my glove and saw the stretched
tongues of the shoes chewed
and stained and gapped at the heel,
so I could buy a hot-cross bun
at lunch though the marks shot up,
though the crust shone like a new coin
and could not be touched by the woman
with my face who waited until the line
brought her to the front, and the dough
smelled like saltwater and milk,
and her hands warmed the paper
worth the same as the dream she
whispered into the hair of her daughter
as she woke her in the lapis lazuli light
the night pulled into the room,
what would you want me
to say? I starched my blouse
and practiced the answers to all
the questions and ribboned my curls
and yes, I bought the knot of bread.
Her eyes tracked the curve
of the curb where pigeons gathered,
and I broke off pieces at my desk
while the sky swallowed everything whole.
Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre, winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press 2013). Her poems have appeared widely, including The New Yorker, POETRY, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, the Believer, and New England Review, and her creative nonfiction won the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose and has appeared in AGNI, Cherry Tree, the Collagist, and is forthcoming in the Rumpus. She is editor-in-chief of The Account, an Assistant Professor of English & Philosophy at New Mexico Highlands University, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.