Brian Blanchfield

What booth is this? The last was a plastic gallows. In the teach me to kiss booth, you paid your dollar to promote, when prompted, a theory. Advised me about standing close and touching him who might next enter in such a way that draws contrast, rough and smooth, cool and warm, maybe the heel of the hand and thumb at the neck if the collar is open and the fingertips two three four, but never anything about the mouth, and then it was time. I back exited through the heavy drapes and opened shop next door. What booth is this? In this booth I have rescued a dovekie but it will not eat. As the tub fills I need you (tore your ticket, right?) to surrender two of the goldfish from this bag. I’ll be back in a minute. The last of the sun is pinkening the ridge beyond the fairgrounds, and I’d like to see. What booth is this? Keep moving everyone. Careful of the gourds; they’re pursing. I’ve handed over the last admission I can afford. Into this booth the branch of a bean tree descends and in an eventuality brought on by what yet I cannot say the armlong pods burst with pellet shot pressure and release seeds like these embedded in the board behind you. The next booth is one I have to man for someone. An emergency. I’ll meet you there. Is this even a booth? In this booth there is room for one. Get in here and hold me up. I would fall without you. Why are we not told plainly? What good as a booth is this, what booth if it be one? Feel the first drop, as from a shearwater ocean bird held high for miles on the cyclonic air, blown far inland, never otherwise seen. The barometer is bottoming. This booth of ours is an eye of the storm simulation.

Where the correlative of reason was conviction and where the correlative of power was obedience, the correlative of authority was trust Your job—she gives another to the child hip-high—is to heat the money in your hands to the optimum warmth for purchase. Cagey, the diversion in the same coin as his want. It buys her time, enough that once they round the corner, she might break into a sprint, as one might with a pet who can keep up. But the prophet makes eyes in his open fists of the nickels’ glint, and we see he forbears our guess her hector gets lost in the flash when as if by swale we all give way to expel a customer from the clench of us without her. For what beneath the moths who have all night to live do we brace ourselves as we approach? We lean to find again the boy’s outguess of us. Demand is double at the walk-up window, where punishment for paltry want is to tell it again into plexiglass the color of slobber, so others in the bleach of halogen light may deal their disparagement forward. For what if not dishonor are we braced, rehearsing what to ask? Repetition is a machine, a machine for converting request into appeal; and commerce, then, the window’s byproduct or balm, depending. Red hot cashews, yellow bag. Only because we visit by day do we know at night what to call at the walk-up window where two aisles of open merchandise end at the sacral plates of clerks before us who, if on pulleys they were carts instead or vending claws, would be by now concussed and dented by lever malevolence outright. The prophet stands eye level with the vending plunge, a here and now mechanism he would need to invent to operate, and stands between it and his mother. Yellow bag. Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal;...                                                           because there is not enough recognition, they make art

Okay, but now imagine someone, one of fifty, say, in the queue, fiftieth first and advancing little, somewhere within the seventy-two-hour window of efficacy for post-exposure prophylaxis, and, later, in the screening room watching The Clock with the few dozen others in rows behind and ahead who had waited too. He knows he has to but he hasn’t yet. We pick it up there. It is two thousand eleven a few more days. The movie tells what time it is. In poetry too we all face forward.