Christopher Impiglia is a New York-based writer, art book editor, and Adjunct Professor of Writing at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received an MFA in Fiction from The New School and an MA in Medieval History and Archaeology from the University of St Andrews. His words have appeared in Columbia Journal, Entropy Magazine, EuropeNow Journal, and Kyoto Journal, among others. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @Impigliato.
Cityscape
Here, megaliths rise, as if to worship the grey clouds
or perhaps the celestial bodies that lurk beyond them,
somewhere, half-forgotten,
like the buildings’ purpose.
Beneath them, linking them, are crossroads
painted in bold, broad brushstrokes
through the eternal dusty dusk of an endless concrete expanse,
broken by manicured gardens and lawns
patrolled only by those who manicure them,
blossoming them for the unseen audience
that gazes from above through tinted windows
that dim the world’s true colors.
A sparse few figures sit or stand at the roads’ edges—
too few to inhabit this space—
joining the façades of the buildings to which they belong,
staring dumbly into their hands,
hiding their faces in neon light,
waiting for some promised life
that doesn’t look likely to ever come.
Others wander to and fro, faceless beneath masks,
from where and to where I can’t understand,
as no true city seems to exist here.
Or it’s an invisible city,
one with no history yet to tell,
to hold it together and imbue it with its soul,
grant it its beliefs, its languages, its songs.
One still at its origin, still rising, still expanding
from the scepter of its half-forgotten founder,
thrust into the bare earth to mark its center.