Nothing is where it used to be.
I picked through the cardigans of a ghost
and found the moth-holes all rearranged.
They said that the farther you traveled,
the closer you came, but that was pure hackwork,
a campaign against the elderly.
I was out for a stroll when the sun
put a banana to my throat
and demanded my wallet.
This must be how the empire was taken,
I thought.
A poem about teeth knocked on my door,
dressed up as a salesman.
The price tags were still on his suit,
but you could tell he was an imposter.
I forgot about everything but the whiteness
of his face. Whiteness within whiteness like
a blank page or a watch face with no arms.
It felt right to feel like a starless night,
at least for now.
I put yellow sticky notes on everything
and they looked like flashlights
moving through a forest,
though I didn’t know
what they were looking for.
Maybe they didn’t either.
A man told me aluminum never leaves the brain
and I pictured it like this, a swarm of flashlights
flickering through the darkness.