Some Things That Are Like a Dismal Pond by the Interstate

A poem.

A cut that you can still taste the stress in.
A glutton for the designated punishment.
An unnatural winter.
Brittle, plastic restraints.
The janitor’s keys strung on a ring the circumference of a little boy’s head.
Solvents splashed across a concrete floor.
A hard rubber ball (flesh color).
Your very worst moment of honesty.
The National Mall.
Two duffel bags (one full of money; the other, severed hands).
A purple bruise at the injection site.
Newspaper pulp with the ink left inside.
A fisherman’s grave.
C-SPAN, unintuitively.
A spray painted rock.
Dishonest protection.
A day without hours.
Game shows where people eat cockroaches (muted, on repeat).
Sheets of aluminum dented with bats.
A thermos of deer urine.
A wax museum gladiator.
A small crescent moon.
Pornography over a dial-up connection.
The smell of butane on worknights.
Our common ancestor (not the monkey, the other one).
An electrical outlet too close to the radiator.
Cobwebs in boxes.
Comforting blisters.
Your hair in clumps on the floor.
The smell behind the fast casual restaurant.
Scattered shell casings.
A conflict of interest.
A dot-matrix printer.
A glass display case full of leaves.
Energy powder.
Rooms without doors.
A reproduction of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, torn from a library book.
A rolled-up tube of toothpaste (cemented to the sink).
That hangdog look you get sometimes.
Betty Boop lamp glowing in a second floor window.
The paint peeling from eyes of the clock.
A gin flask in a hollowed-out dictionary.
Personal demons resembling centipedes.
A satellite codenamed “Godhead” (operator unknown).
Boots held together with duct tape.
Two hours of wind sounds.
An emaciated wolf.
The opposite of Christmas.
The German sky.
Unquietness.