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STOREFRONTS 1. That daylight should be daylight so utterly as, in the ten-million storefronts of my country, clerks adjust the latest fashions on mannequins, and here illegals wear boards on their knees to level concrete outside an investment firm’s offices, volcanic, curdled earth, at the entrance of the building from which I nightly am disgorged 2.
means the memoranda of America insist chronic tardiness will jeopardize your position on the a.m. shift, 3.
but maybe we’re living in a demonstration model home, light through the skylight fetched in by light bulb. Maybe every day’s Saturday. Maybe it’s Sunday. A recording somewhere plays the cough of a dog’s bark and friends in the next room. Maybe it’s play food in the unplugged refrigerator 4.
in my country, where the water tastes like somebody’s mouth, where I can’t keep count of what I’m angry at and lie down like any animal, in some dark place to sleep. HOTEL IVAN ALBRIGHT Implore the night clerk: “We want to have been exalted, not grow bald in small rooms, hairstyles on the women naked in our same few magazines increasingly unfashionable. We heat our meals in this hotel and swallow every forkful. If doorways weren’t open coffins and mirrors didn’t injure, room numbers all day descend to zero, if window shades weren’t see-through and air an X-ray exposing each successive skeleton and its dress of flesh, if eyes weren’t clear as liquor and liquor didn’t twitch…” The night clerk flinches, Eviction tattooed on each scarred wrist. PRAYER FOR RECOMPENSE my name silvery and glittering, surface area and dollar amounts so large I bungee-cord lash them to each week’s brand-new roof rack, manhandle monetary instruments drive-through window huge, lift across bank parking lots, spun this way and that in the trillionaire wind. Jaw-droppingly rich, the children construct lean-tos and rafts, kites rising miles, or luge and toboggan, ink a precious-metal sheen smearing wintry hills. OUT OF BODY After the usual traffic of
ground, then guy-wires, power-lines
and skillet-fried clouds was
me, looking distant
as suspended Houdini baffling crowds, visible
only by the trajectory
of
necks craned en masse
How
small I was
and
wrong
like
the extra letter
in
one word
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aaron anstett's
recent work appears in Cranky and Word For/Word as well as the
anthologies Bedside Guide to No Tell
Motel and Digerati: 20
Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World. His second collection, No
Accident, was selected by Philip Levine for the 2004 Backwaters
Press
Prize.
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