Monaco
This penthouse is known and loved by someone as Home Sweet Home.
If the owner has left the door open, anyone can enter. Otherwise only the owner or people with an access code can enter.
Note from Katrin
Monaco, Monaco —
frivolous, ridiculous, miniscule principality.
It was there they came to know
how dangerous beauty could be, how one could disappear into it,
and with that dark knowledge they traveled on.
Each, in their separate lives,
always mentioned Monaco with deference,
out of shyness, yes, but also shame, and that need
to abridge the past. Do you recognize them?
They were not a couple, but they were a pair.
Tonight the sea pushes against Monaco.
Jewelry store owners don white gloves, lock their doors.
The principality has long forgotten the pair.
Baronesses, marchionesses, and princesses
have had their portraits painted and affixed to walls.
The narrow, dead-end streets embed themselves
into the escarpments like bobby pins.
The moon spreads her cape of baubles across the sea
with glamorous transience, enlarging
behind the dollhouse casino, banks, hotels,
feeling into the rooms, fingering the miniatures.