Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Rimas Uzgiris

Here the present interweaves with the past Like two points of parallax, a double vision Soon to be spirited away by practical Quotidian powers making sense of sight: Glass walls… a bar? The mind’s own prison.

Sure it’s not your part of the world but

i’m trying to tell you something about riga and its hard with all these distractions the enchantments of old town winding cobblestone streets hanseatic architecture mysterious stone-lined passages opening onto brick-oven churchyards with the bremen musicians in deathless bronze turning left into a secreted pub to imbibe meter-long sausages and beer ending up at the monument to independence an obelisk on viagra, excited to be here beside a curvy park along the canal with pleasure boats sailing pleasantly towards eisenstein’s new town art nouveau with women in the walls holding up the world as i said in another poem while on the other side of the old town maze you hit a river, the dauguva, its big-lipped mouth not like our vilnius rivers: anorexic models on high heels but voluptuous like the mississippi and you can almost imagine huck finn floating down in his stone-age raft though he wouldn’t have an african-american with him

and he wouldn’t be huck finn but some child of german imperialists or of russian imperialists, scion of some transplanted soviet worker who never learned latvian in the forty years of his life here and jim would be the latvian serf who had slaved for his master

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