County Holding

In county holding, girls recite the future from memory.

Sleep is an escape. Blankets for those with perfect zeros.

In county holding, the girls, they’re always using the phones—

just a speaker inside a metal box inside the wall.

The recording tells me: Hold for your party with a card to pay.

I don’t count myself a girl who breaks things accidentally.

On the first day of the new year I ask a stranger how I arrived.

He informs me of last night’s felony where four hands

pulled me from the floor into the street while pedestrians

waited for the descent of a familiar sphere. I’m back there,

fingers bleeding on a winter dress, cuffed inside an idled car

denying the dividing glass of remembering.

Those who think their bodies don’t exist

Those who think their bodies don’t exist
think of exploding the Quick-Mart

with toothpaste and cigarettes.
It was a room full of practical ideas.

No one thought to listen
to the kids in the street explaining

the red accident as a punishment
for stealing and everything.

An inordinate number of men
stand watch over a hieroglyphic lake.

If the victim falls somewhere
between the weather and a robbery,

somewhere between drowning
and awake, you assume every question

is an excuse to speak. At home,
a woman prepares to play a record

of her quietly constructed life.

In the land of emergencies

In the land of emergencies
and nights spent driving edges
of public parks, or just after,
you become one of one.

Your accomplice left you
in a locker room in a basement,
where the girl in her triangle dress
is always turning them away.

You can’t keep yourself from
inviting them in. You’re wearing
an outfit of metal and electricity
to feel dangerous, or for the anarchist

village beyond the hill. Sparks the year
the slope caught fire made everyone
stand still. Wind patterns above the station.
Few seconds remain before the swarm.

The dispatcher sends you a lighter
in the form of a familiar address.