BRENDAN JOYCE

Little Window

Five summers out from the collapse
of the wage I pull quarters from couch
cushions like crabs from their cage. I know there’s only
an inch of dusk left before I have to start counting.
Dearest de-arrest, distressed assets arsoned,
darling, even the sunset knows the name
of what’s crashing
Everything everywhere belonging to everyone
not having come to pass, whose body
is this then that cannot make itself again?

When we wanted everything, we wanted
everything to be night; the river’s mechanical
curves, the lake’s illegal color, all of the
bleached concrete and molten asphalt
and rotting doubles. But the sun slathers
itself across modern luxury icicle housing
and miles of drone footage.
Knife music! Counterfeit sky!
We wanted everything to be night,
They gave us Night alright!

Our enemies and our friends and our families
and our curses and our embarrassing grudges
and our impossible crushes and our discerning taste
— collapsed into the wage. The yolk slithering
across the city. Flattened into the spreadsheet of the
sky’s cartoon ledger. Whistling the tune of
collateralized debt obligation. Hunted for sport
in credit default swap Walmart parking lot. Lines of credit
unspool across midwinter paydays.

Even the screen of the sky flickers with the
ambitions of mid-level b2b marketers.
If the wage relation were an abandoned
Cleveland movie theatre the marquee
would read: Now Playing Mass
Unemployment, One Night Only!

Make a computer do that.
Again! What criss-crossed this world
thrice to become my toaster?
It slices! It dices! It’s hegemonic!
They’re slurping up something worse
just outside your field of vision.
The congealed form of the whatever,
fermented in the sludge of whatever,
I carry it with me, in the soles of my shoes,
you carry it with you.

Brendan Joyce is a poet.