Michael Smith
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Plans
It begins with something missing — the right
friends, an urgency of interests, all-night diners —
and moves outward to a survey
of other cities. We pick up and discard Atlanta
because it's the South, New York because it's
too busy, Washington because it sits upon
its culture like a great trousered butt.
Our longing runs surgically across the Midwest,
gutting Chicago, neutering St. Louis. We wield
the awful razor of a few adjectives against
the Rockies and dismiss San Francisco
as hermetic, Los Angeles as chaotic.
Small towns, villages, districts, bergs are excised
like moles on the country's cheek. From Boston
to San Diego, entrails, limbs, blights,
the neuroses of neighborhoods, leaving intact
only this kitchen in this house
and two people talking, at last, about themselves.
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Michael Smith’s fiction and poetry have appeared in several publications, including Iowa Review, Seneca, Northwest Review, Water-Stone, Gemini Magazine, Readers & Writers (London), Metaworker (online), among others. His flash fiction story, “Bass Weather,” was included in the 2017 edition of Best Short Fiction. He is a graduate of the MFA program from the University of Arizona and lives in Pomona, CA.