I am sitting in my boxers at the kitchen table.
I stare at some chicken, soggy fries and
a hefeweizen I have just begun to enjoy.
It's November with the windows open
and the landlord's heat turned so high I almost feel like
summer—the back porch of Marisia's third floor apartment—
where we were parched and crawled
along the boards, drank water by the spoonful,
woke up sick with the brown bottle fever
until the floods came. We paddled
through MacArthur Park in a canoe,
then back to the apartment. We felt
the goodtime sway there,
tipsy beyond all beer and piped miasma,
an undulated cadence that went until
the crack heads even banged their ceilings.

Marisia's apartment had
the best view in all of homely Binghamton:
though you only saw the statehouse building
and some blinking tower lights against the mountains,
I always thought it was sublime.
And what of absolutes? So what
of the concreteness of buildings and
light photons? of words
on a page?

When you speak of transport,
it only matters where you are.
If a breeze blows through an open window
and takes us somewhere
we do not first ask
where it is we go.

***

Micah Towery works as a Coke delivery driver, church organist, and sometimes bus driver. He has been considering getting a Moby-Dick tattoo, and recently woke to find the ancient Greek word 'pantos' scrawled on his wall. Though generally not superstitious, he would like to think the two are related.