![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62b9b639d0a0f646e5cb8354/9882bccf-9549-4865-bc8b-c21841e62bd4/Curiosity_I-IV1024_3.jpg)
Devolution of the Neighbor’s Balcony in Four Acts
by Matthew Bullen
Art: “Curiosity III” by Molly LAy
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.