Self-Portrait as Luxury Mid-Rise Apartment Complex
Call me Urbane, Echo, the Flats at Alewife Center.
Hammered, plastered, and stapled, epoxied,
I glow inside with rows and rows of little orange doorbells.
A subcontractor whistles a gray plastic cart piled with nails
onto gleaming elevators that only go up.
I gaze through glassy Windex-streaked eyes
over brown wetland as if I had no childhood.
I have always been here and also, I am entirely new.
There is no dirt under my short fingernails,
there are no old lotus pods slimy, sunken in my muck,
no cold, sinewy dinosaur heart beats in my sky.
Amy Wise Rothschild’s writing has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the 2024 winner of the Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Poetry. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.