Joe
Bueter
In town long enough,
sightless turns down
streets replace the map
that stayed unmade
like a weekend bed
on the seat. In town long
enough to know that
the homeless marchers
at night
on the sandy
shoulders
are not the undead
holding hands with bikes
of bone. I’ve let it
go,
the ambiguous scum
on the cheap
blinds in the
bathroom,
even though I’ve imagined
the stains to be
from the
vodka-laced,
directionless jaws
of a former resident.
The smell of sea and
air
now the smell of air.
Thumbing the files, odd
and common days
somehow
larger than others, the filing omnipresent
or lazy. The mind
is a slipshod
archivist;
I search for some pages
to maim, to keep strange.
Joe Bueter is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he served as the poetry editor of Ecotone. His poetry has been published in Confrontation, Southern Humanities Review, Nashville Review, Cave Wall, Parcel, and others. He lives in State College, PA and teaches writing at Penn State University.
This poem appeared in Sakura III.
