The city was a Tiffany blue
faux leather jewelry box
with a dozen compartments
filled with faux ballerinas and pearls
and a little mirror to check earlobes.
She kept the city in her closet
to visit whenever she was feeling
cosmopolitan.
The sidewalk hummed a tune from 1954
(when eyeglasses and bras
pointed the way to quick ruin).
Decades rumbled from beneath
layers of paved crosswalks
-like Poe’s telltale highway,
but the road craved a Greyhound,
not retribution.
A porter longed to punch a ticket
– but there was no train.
A woman was too busy
to notice rain on a scurrying rat’s tail.
The case would be shut yet unlocked
as she imagined people inside
running in circles but slowly,
like licking away at a lollipop.