I.     Golden Age

One of the neighbors likes to smoke

and likes to throw his ends at the

alley below, especially while yelling

at his girlfriend:

they paint a scatterplot of arguments

as the weeks slip by.

One morning, I notice that the spent ends

have fled in the night. Somebody wove

lifelike plastic ivy through the iron rails.

Somebody also hung a bird feeder.

Little birds are messy eaters. The discarded

shells leave a blast radius on the asphalt,

spreading steadily amid the chirps.

II.     Silver Age

During a protest afternoon, a man

hauling a bicycle wheel on his back,

along with a few luxury shopping bags,

waves a length of half inch metal pipe

at no one in particular

then pauses by the back steps.

He takes out his cell phone and insists

I listen to his favorite track.

This is fire! Tell me this

isn’t fire.

I agree that it is a song about fire,

certainly.

The door above slams shut.

III.    Bronze Age

The back steps stay quiet enough

for coffee at dawn, or a thermos

of beer at dusk – dusk, the right hour

for pictures of the full moon

or the horns of a waxing eclipse.

The ivy and the feeder

have disintegrated without trace.

On Saturday mornings, a girl takes

acoustic guitar lessons, scratching chords

behind the bare rails, between coughs –

Freedom’s just another word

for nothing left to lose…

– her tutor calls it busking for air.

IV.    Iron Age

The ivy has grown back, fluorescent

this time, but without the finches,

– or the feeder, or the busking –

though it now surveys a nest

of patrol cars sneaking breaks

in the semi-subterranean car port,

and a neighbor in off-brand sportswear

who demands if the rest of us live here,

if you run across him out back.

People walking their dogs

don’t make much eye contact,

though the dogs take barking lessons,

if they can be kept on leash.

Matthew Bullen holds an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, England, and is the founder and head editor of Red Ogre Review, an indie press that publishes an online journal of contemporary poetry and visual art and a poetry chapbook series.

Matt has poetry published with Arsenic Lobster, glassworks, Harpy Hybrid Review, Rejection Letters, The Daily Drunk (SMOL Fair Zine), tiny frights, and Underwood, creative nonfiction with National Geographic and the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, and fine art photography with Exist Otherwise, Punk Monk Magazine, and Setu Magazine. He lives in Santa Monica, California.