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PHOENIX
There’s a place in this city that’s black.Prateebha Tuladhar
There’s a place in this city that’s black.
not gray, or brown
or even a distant charcoal. But black.
It’s a triangle—
that juts into the corner
of the ground floor
of the lotto building.
(People queue up here, endlessly
guessing at their lucky numbers.)
The triangle is the bed
for the homeless.
The men-
sometimes two,
sometimes, three,
sometimes just one.
appear and disappear,
merging into the blackness.
They eat out of plastic bags
and paper spread out against the floor,
noiseless, lean bodies
propped on iron shafts,
Some days of heavy rain,
the colour of their skin is brown.
Other days,
they are the same shade
as the sooty walls that surround them.
When the rest of Manila
passes the triangle by
in Aircon cars
and ingenuous tricycles and jeepneys,
the men sleep
as though in the deepest trance.
The heat.
The crowd.
They don’t seem to matter.
Sometimes, the triangle is deserted.
The men
disappear in their semi-nakedness.
I walk past swiftly
trampling the roasted tarmac under my flipflops
thinking of their bare feet.
It’s almost as if
the triangle consumes the men
and creates them all over again,
just to bring the space back to life.
This part of the city
resurrects
with the presence of the men.
—an act staged, over and over again
Just for sake of the passersby.