The Drawer

Your hand does not come to the end of the slot. It comes to a drawer, long and shallow and dry as a hymnal, that goes back farther than the bridge does.

Slips lie flat in it, hundreds, cream stock, one line each. They begin like something and then they stop. Nobody sorts them. They sort themselves by weight, the heaviest at the back.

You lift three from the front.

Sky the color of a peach someone has been thinking about.

Years of dirt for a few weeks of noise.

A bus arrives and doesn't open its doors. It just waits.

You put them back in the order you found them.