JOSHUA HARMON
from LE SPLEEN DE POUGHKEEPSIE
The view from basement
windows through yellow
grasses brittle between
paving squares: sparrows
light from minor arcs and
the earth's curve offers me
smokestacks: the splice
where churchbell peals
and appeals are joined
to phrases like this one:
sock holes and test patterns,
the concepts a shovel's worked
over when the parents
aren't home, a body bound
to a place of declining
balances and a sycamore's
displacements: they are
rebuilding the city
from a hatchback filled
with day-old loaves and all
the appropriate resentments:
a lesson in looking good
with a cigarette and magnifying
one's own restlessness,
fashions in felt-tipped pen:
the redneck hegemon in
costume dramas beside
the warehouse's dirty snowpiles:
and our own kingdom
goes, unaccountably