Epektasis

Berlin was colder than memory admits.
The city chose accuracy over mercy.
Morning held at zero;
the air squared itself.
Colour retreated into vein and coal.

Snow found the graffiti
and did not quiet it—
it underlined it,
a white finger saying: here.

The Wall persisted in fragments,
bones refusing soil.
The body gone,
the lesson intact.
Along the tram lines metal thinned its voice,
wire drawn too tight to sing.
The U-Bahn slid underground,
an animal that no longer trusts daylight,
brushing walls for heat.

At crossings, brass names waited.
You stumble when you forget
where you are standing.
They catch the sole.
They hold.

Rain came later—
dense, granular,
forgetting how to fall.
In the courtyard, stones collected sky,
dark bowls filling.
Someone coughed,
close enough to be counted.
The dead did not arrive.
They were already set in place.

The television flickered.
Faces broke into colour, vanished.
My grandfather’s prison was a train away—
Magdeburg: brick sweating cold,
a bunk that taught the spine
the cost of standing upright.
I know this because the body remembers
what the tongue will not risk.

I wanted to touch what remained,
pull brick from winter-bitten brick,
test whether fracture
could warm the hands.
Snow knows better.
It erases by expertise.

At the Reichstag the river shed cold,
skimming it at our legs.
A fox crossed from the Tiergarten,
narrow, precise,
measuring us for usefulness.
Later, a raven did the same,
its shadow arriving first.

We are never native.
Even quiet,
we take up space.

I love this city
for what did not heal.
For light that enters
through seams never sealed.
For hands that know
how to guide without claiming.
For bread left for a fox—
no witness required.