(After Michael Earl Craig) A standard street lamp on my desk lights a bench. All of the buildings on the shelves are quiet and dark and lean into one another, sleep standing up, and not a soul comes to sit on the bench the length of a No. 2 pencil, not one of the wind-up toys, the waving cat, the orange with a hole for sharpening pencils, not the eraser that says Smart Women Make Changes. Under the green lozenge from the reading lamp, a steady dotted line is falling where bats in summer are like a flock of paper cuts onto this bench, a city bus stop, the slim leather building in the row of color houses. Late at night, I move the neighborhood around, putting lovers and spouses next to each other, the suicides and early deaths together, ones from Mexico, France, Chile, Germany of the 1980s, in a new atlas. I sit a nineteenth century poet beside a modern American I know she’d get along w/ & be the less lonely. I line up teachers and friends. I take my vitamins, which include the stain glass window over a certain staircase, a lozenge, triborough on a key chain. I turn on Music from Brainwave Massage Creative Mind System, and they sway like water plants on stems, drifting amniotically.
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