Ryan Lott

Lisbon:

Lisboa oh Lisboa. The city of ports or one port, the port, the city with all those tired neighborhoods, Barrio Alto and Alfama, those vandalized, graffiti froth decaying streets presenting women sitting in broken chairs drinking Bica, children kicking soccer balls into heaps of trash outside doorsteps, Africans roasting chicken in burnt out grills, the occasional lost beggar stumbling through the wreckage as tourists coast by on yellow tram number twenty eight. Maybe all those Fado songs truly are so sad, those melodramatic women wearing swooping shirts inside dim candle glowing bars, eyes closed, crowing lost sailors' ballads or Lisbon's endless poignant denial of the sea, businessmen grinning like idiots as their heads nod along, soldiers remembering all those miles wandering in Mozambique, sweating, those boys that were so brave and the moving songs we had to sing for girls sitting on benches watching grandmothers bring out their trash at dawn on a lonely street by the church, while a steam tanker comes in from the docks.

A laughing carcass with a cigarette in its teeth is a poster in an abandoned china store where blue and white cups sit in roach egg boxes, a woman in the metro with an injured shoulder tries to get a young man to come home with her, tells him about her professions, about playing piano, she was a doctor before she fell out of love to become a botanist, then a lawyer, he watches stations pass by, remembering his girlfriend's lost voice on her final phone call, the way he'd imagined her looking huddled at a pay phone in the pouring rain. Lisboa, oh Lisboa, he thought, like a ferry tracing circles around an empty lake.