[POETRY]

[11/7/25]

Seattle/
London/
Los Angeles

by Christina Ungermann

Rara and I met two new guys from Seattle last night
Ran with them all over town
Past yellow-line street-walkers,
Into an afters,
Every someone familiar,
Multiplying.
A new friend, the aspiring agent,
Pretended to take a phone call
So we all followed him upstairs,
Like children
We laughed and laughed and laughed
Then felt an unspeakable brief terror

A door loomed at the end of a dark hallway

Empty, black
Like an escape hatch from a dream:
The earthquake hasn’t happened yet,
But you fear the basement will start to shake,
And the termite-weakened wood, the old Victorian wood,
Will collapse on you, the weight of it all
pressing your bones to dust—
Dead on the Fourth of July

The two guys from Seattle said—
This city is so different. Not like our cultural wasteland.
But that was before the show, the disappointing “punk” show;
When they came back, depressed by the Uber prices,
Depressed by the crowd.
“There is no working-class English music anymore,”
A quiet wail, that everything looks the same now,
Though there are boys who sing of “London,”
Girls who scream, “Los Angeles,”
Every city winks at night with the same money.

They had seemed particularly hopeful about the English—
If 5,000 miles away, there are people in clubs,
Angry about housing prices,
Angry about the war,
Maybe it can be imported,
And we can scream about it too.

We are awake at night anyway,
Bats circling the same spires.

CHRISTINA UNGERMANN is a writer and filmmaker from northern California who lives in Los Angeles. In a past life, she was probably a fish.