trout

junkshop

Jen Crawford

a flinch – like his burrow's been pawed
shallow then open. a bruise of a doorway,
puddle tape & haily screens. puddle eyes shaking,
taping hail ghosts, resisting.
because the sign says he's open, I push,
trouble yellow towers of bruised magazines.
walls accrete, paths won't
quite remember themselves so you
make your own welcome,
leave him back in the storm
warding off panicked voices. nothing falls,
at least for me. dust cilia lift away
& I push

become smaller, an elbowless cunning, a slip
where a spool is a stone,
where wringers, tills, bellows
and sinks are bricks for vaults
tilting to rifts
in the continents of plaster pulled lung-shaped.
the mezzanine heaves,
hangers frayed to iron threads,
the ceiling coaxed to bowing,
to suspending
the very long illness

that rests greatest weight
where the structure is weakest.
boxes barricade the stairs, make
the barricade's flaw. this permission
to rise. but light, not letting
little creaks tell lies, no substance to footsteps
falling between
steel rudders, freezer chests,
a cedar bed – it's all needed. & this view
over the maze of closed lanes, railed off,
caught. in black stack sums the pale face
turns up to disease – one breach
in a body's swelling commerce with itself –
a whispering: please leave now. please leave.