No. 5

Winter 2004

I lived in this city full of stupid objects
And glorified rounds of pass the police, cringing

Where everyone was short and wide and full of notions
Ready to begin their movements, brief as manifestos

In the bar, after the owner's heart attack, everything
We absorbed was put on credit cards for later

And the man then sleeping next to me had holes
In all his t-shirts he'd put there for ventilation

Every house had coffee cans filled up with sand
Upon their porches, behind each screen door

A band was playing "Hallelujah," without
Its drummer (there were only three in town

And they rotated between living rooms like specters
Of necessity); on the bus each morning I would sit

Next to a girl named Catherine, whose shoulder
Ironically read "Daddy" in sparrow-blue swirls

Banners like sailors from the past, she put on
Shows in her garage and people drove in from towns

With complicated names huffed up with consonants:
Puwallup, Tacoma, Bend. In a freeway-side bungalow

Someone spiked my drink and I woke up in someone's car
While my boyfriend was taking punches to the face

On bets, and we went home with pockets full of bills
No comprehension of denomination or what it might have meant

To allow ourselves some "spending money," as I pushed frozen peas
Against his face and made collect calls to Berkeley

Announcing that we'd birthed, at last, our own manifesto
Which, by the time I hung up, had vaporized just like a smudge.

Copyright 2003, Kaya Oakes

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.