Somewhere between here & there,
a face peers at you between screeching
subway cars. On the advertisement screen
above, sin city glows green & yellow.
In an alternate universe, the focal point
is negative, the image actually farther
than it seems. Sometimes it feels like you’re
underwater—light bending towards itself,
an inverted world looking back. For all that
it’s worth, these are hard times. We stuff
our pockets with smudged, faded receipts
& objects from a distant past: an old cracked
iPod, instruction manuals for furniture,
spare buttons for a donated blouse. & maybe
these are all wishes in disguise, something
you dug up from suburbia & brought back
to share. Your mother used to tell you the
world was rotting, so maybe these were relics
instead, though they didn’t mean anything
to anyone but you. You wish you could forget,
flush everything—the jewelry, poems, dried
hibiscus petals—down the toilet. No one
would stop you. It could be as easy as brushing
your teeth each morning, or putting a hand
over your eyes & squeezing the last bent rays
of light that poked through. You must
learn to move on, despite missing your stop.