face, bulwarked with
worry. The zebra
crossing is usually
busier. Its regulars,
limping and diabetic,
more boisterous.
The logos they wear
render me illiterate.
It must be the hour,
the silent metronome
of the red light
synchronized to the train
that sends the sleepwalkers
into a jog. Trance being
more anxious
than any daydream.
When we compare what
occurs to us to
a camera, we’re often
tightening exclusively
on the lens. Glassy
myth more literal
than human vision,
which operates
via inversion. The manufacture
of manufactured
goods we mastered,
letting dramaturgy’s
secrets be supplanted
by handbooks quickly
skimmable. So
a windshield is
not a window. Not
the panes
I cautiously (without
pronouncing) approached
following the call. This,
my pause, a ripple
emanating from the two
men striding briskly
below. Outpacing
them. Haste lifted
their jackets —
blazers — by their
tails. Their conversation,
gloved, shorn. Maybe
they had just visited
the plaque freshly
dedicated at an intersection
my position then
prevented me from
regarding. Transcribing
a murder ballad,
this commemoration
turns it atonal. Very
modern. Because I feel
a duty to say I have
acknowledged this anemic
acknowledgement made
in my name (the pseudonym
of us), I intersperse
my attention. I leave
my plans open,
calendar particulars.
TBD. Disclaimer: I never
hinted at more honorable
motives. I did and will
ascribe: an assumption
RSVPing for active
shooter drills.
Public Domain
was “dollar”
the road noise the aggression
backwards masking
the tenor of the
man’s beseeching
I auditioned some ad-libs
a range of gesticulations in the moment
beyond muscle memory all meant
to confirm the absence
of cash on my person
the two quarters sitting in
my cupholder reserved for a purpose
don’t rate
Buddha palms shaking
their virtual penury
or maybe I clapped them
but mostly as prelude to pulling
them apart again
fleshy curtains opening on nothing
look askance this fragmentation
you should see for
the stratagem it is ditto
the parataxis in if not of
counting how many
letters “forbearance” and “deferral”
share like DNA
later a parking meter
threw up all over me
shirt and shoes
deficit of regimes cycled
out of circulation
I had been reading about
an old diner you could
enter only through an alley door
the screen a discoloration
the manganese of a reflection deforming
in a dead television tube the sour
almond that Oblomovs around
the converted Denny’s smoking section
more than a gate
the logic validating the impossibility
of my taking
your humanity away from
you also says without saying
as much that
I cannot give it back
I had been thinking about
the building where Rose
Elizabeth Slovacek Stivers wore
bluebonnets served hamburgers being torn
down and now this
