Annick Yerem

Berlin, 1998

You had to make a fire, heat the oven, all this to have a bath.
For me, the Wessi girl, this was as new as imprints of grenades
on houses everywhere, my small world shaken by the smell
of coals, adventure, something I could not define.
An artistry of hot & cold & creaking taps & boiling water hissing
on the outside of the oven, all this mine.
I chopped up fruit boxes, stuffed them in & lit the fire,
then lay in the black bathroom with the Anna Akhmatova poster
& the tiny window at its back, which you could only open pulling
on a string, I still remember how it made me sing & proud to be
a woman who could reinvent herself, a wood-burning mermaid