& what is a city but a mouth Paris, or maybe just the echo of it— twilight unzipping over glass, Scarlatti slipping into the air like a match blown out, each note a gold thread burning & gone. Love arrives like this— without asking, without hands, a fever crawling the spine of a city until you mistake it for your own. Then Praha, or whatever name will have me. Streets pink with the last spill of sun, music unraveling from an unseen room— a ghost humming itself whole. Some places do not ask you to stay. They enter the body & lock the door. Inside me, the night breathes. And I— I am still here.