(Revised, with thanks to Edgar Gabriel Silex for his comments.)

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I love her when she is Washington D.C.,
tangled as a budget bill
wrapped in backroom deals;

love her when she is Seattle
full of homeless and
resigned wet;

love her when she’s New York City,
beating me hard,
keeping me up all night.

On the days when she is Boston
I can’t decide: which part of her
do I like best, which do I fear most?

One day I hope to find she has become
Redemptia, that no one has founded yet;
I want to walk its streets at a loss

to understand
its neighborhoods,
how it was built, how it grew.

I fear one day I will learn that
she is and has always been Angkor Wat
or Babylon, swallowed, abandoned

to jungle or sand, streets only memories,
walls nubs of remainder and lost glamour,
and no way at all to rebuild her.

Some days she was Washington D.C.
as tangled as a budget bill
and wrapped in backroom deals.

Some days she was Seattle
full of the homeless and
resigned wet.

Some days, like New York City,
she beat me hard
and kept me up all night.

And on the days she was Boston
I couldn’t decide which part of her
I liked best and which I feared most.

I hope one day to find she has become
a city I call Redemptia that no one has founded yet.
I want to walk its streets and be completely at a loss

to understand its map, its neighborhoods,
how it was built and how it grew. I want to discover it
as if I was its only inhabitant, now and forever.

I fear one day I will learn that in fact
she is and has always been Angkor Wat
or Babylon, swallowed and abandoned

to jungle or sand, her streets only memories,
her walls nubs of remainder and lost glamour,
and no reason at all to rebuild her.