Haussman

Every day at work the curators act as themselves.
I abandon my post,
wielding a book whose jacket
is blue like twilight in the park where my shadow
goes absent. The tan bookpaper —
sketched with drawings of eyes — sees
me open, long before August goodbyes
at home where I am poor but live alone at the beginning of the real
shadows that annex each apartment aging
open and bare-faced. Laissez-faire coffee-goers.
Runners turning to see who they pass. “I had never seen
such a gay child, not since myself.”

ξ

Nathan Blansett has poems in the Bennington Review. An MFA student in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, he divides his time between Baltimore and Los Angeles.