Foreign City

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In “Foreign City,” Georgia Shreve captures the uncanny moment when home becomes strange under the spell of morning perception. The poem drifts through transformed streets, seductive urban details, and borrowed European textures, before one abrupt sound pulls the speaker back to the real city beneath the fantasy.

First published:

In “Messages Never Sent”

Published in

“Foreign City” is a poem about perceptual dislocation: the sensation that familiar streets can suddenly feel foreign, glamorous, and newly charged. Shreve stages this shift through sensory overlays, hotel breakfast, coffee in the mind, monumental bridges, incense-like cigarettes, so that the ordinary city is briefly re-authored as elsewhere.

The poem’s turn is swift and surgical. After this dreamlike recasting, harsh civic sound breaks the spell: bus brakes, ambulance wail, the recognizably local textures of Cleveland. What remains is a layered portrait of consciousness itself, how desire, memory, classed fantasy, and urban noise can coexist in the same breath.

Foreign City

By Georgia Shreve

The early morning air
That quickens the blood
Turns my hometown
Into a foreign city.
Stepping into the well-known light,
I feel a hotel breakfast
Stirring in my stomach,
Foreign coffee brewing in my brain.

My own streets look like
Rues and straßen.
The bridges I have always crossed
Are monumental,
And the graffiti have become
Colorful and artistic.
And the passing cigarettes
Seductive as incense.
The aromas of baking
Reach me before smells of the road,
Yet something yanks me back—

The screech of a bus,
The wail of an ambulance—
To the everyday smells
Of Cleveland.

Reading Notes

In “Foreign City,” Shreve transforms hometown streets into a brief dream of elsewhere, layering the ordinary with European aura, appetite, and cinematic glamour. The poem’s final turn, abrupt urban sound returning the speaker to Cleveland, reveals how quickly perception can mythologize place, and how suddenly reality reasserts its voice.What gives “Foreign City” its snap is the speed of its perceptual shift. The poem opens in a register of exhilaration, where morning air “quickens the blood” and immediately alters the speaker’s relationship to place. Home is not left behind physically, but it is momentarily recoded psychologically. That recoding is the poem’s governing action.

Shreve builds this altered state through sensory substitution. The speaker is not simply observing a city, she is metabolizing it: hotel breakfast in the stomach, foreign coffee in the brain. This is a brilliant move because it turns atmosphere into physiology. The fantasy of elsewhere is not abstract or intellectual, it becomes bodily, intimate, and persuasive.

The middle section sharpens the effect through diction and texture. Streets become rues and straßen; bridges become monumental; graffiti becomes aesthetic rather than blighted. Even cigarettes shift from nuisance to “incense.” These are not neutral details. They reveal how framing changes value, how the same object can read as grit or glamour depending on the story consciousness is telling at that moment.

Then comes the hinge: “Yet something yanks me back—.” That verb, yanks, is crucial. The return to reality is not gentle. It is abrupt, almost physical. The final sounds, bus screech, ambulance wail, collapse the dream of foreignness and restore local specificity. The poem lands not in disappointment exactly, but in recognition: the ordinary city persists beneath projection.

Formally, the poem mirrors that movement with elegant economy. Long enough to establish atmosphere, short enough to preserve impact, it ends on “Cleveland” as a tonal ground note, plain, factual, unadorned. The achievement of “Foreign City” is that it does not mock the fantasy or worship it. It shows how quickly the mind aestheticizes the familiar, and how quickly the world answers back.