Text
/
Poetry
The Radiator Answers at Three
Year
2023
By
Northern Window, issue 14
Format
Print and online
Language
English, German
Description
The theme of this issue was “neighbours”, and we received more poems about walls than we expected. Most of them were about keeping people out. Lena Müller's three poems are about the opposite: the strange intimacy of hearing a stranger not sleep, of sharing pipes and hours and a stairwell with people whose names you never learn.
They are night poems, written in the small hours and best read there. We placed them at the centre of the issue, where the pages fall open on their own.
— Kadri Tamm, editor, Northern Window, from the issue's introduction
Excerpt
At three the radiator speaks
in a language I almost know.
I answer anyway.
Down the hall someone is not sleeping
in the same key as me.
We keep each other company
through the wall, through the hour,
through the word neither of us says.
By five the pipes go quiet.
The city clears its throat.
Whatever we agreed on in the dark
we will not mention in the stairwell.
— Northern Window, issue 14, pp. 31–33
