Francesco Levato
 

The places in-between
 
 
 
 
 

Huddled in the distance the silhouette of skyscrapers blur one into another through exhaust stained air, yellowed like the nicotine tarring of bar room windows intangible, as if reaching for it would disrupt a delicate balance, exhaling would scatter it like ashes. Opposite the train tracks stretch to infinity leaving vacant warehouses,  their burnt out windowpanes staring, for the uniformity of lawns grown like shag carpet, the idyllic surface whose tension we dare not break. And in-between, sharp flashes of sunlight lash out from abandoned liquor bottles, hard, bone-dry, each one drained of the sweetest oblivion you can buy for the price of a couple packs of smokes, bleached asphalt streaked with tread marks, beaten into submission with Nike clad feet and territorial colors sprayed like blood. Tattered streamers of plastic jitter in the wind, grocery bags, food wrappers, remnants of someone's day, proof of their existence caught in the barbed wire looped round the tops of chain link fences, the undeclared flag of this marginal state.

First published in Outsider Ink

  (c)Levato 2004