How to stay warm in the city

by Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

The Yeoville winter evening
loves its people
skin to skin:
this seducing season that
stripped the trees now
tongues nipples into hardness;
charcoal breath caresses
naked necks and runs
its freezing fingers over faces;
strokes
the limbs with
intense
sustained
relentless
lust.

As the molten heart of day submits,
the city inherits
its transient gold,
but we resist the insistent evening’s kiss
with its
traces of death’s embraces;
we quit the cloying cold
for
our private and modular,
singular accommodations;
one by one
we blow to flame our comfort
and surrender
to domestic rituals:

Yeoville, imboula mountain
The lights of flats like embers.