New: The Street by Chris Pusateri

after Jacques Roubaud, with a line by Sylvia Plath

I'm still awake.

I walk in darkness
as if this sidewalk, by
its floodlight burgled
from a rich woman's toilet or the
last penny pinched from a
pickpocket's pocket,
is the ibis
of the present spectacle--primeval, antique.
Now, then
crickets sweep the evening
daybreaks squeak into exhausted brassieres
and this darkness in which I walk
cowers before the brightness of an all-night pharmacy,
where a sapling, twice a tree
for trying to be, promises itself to pavement.

"sleeplessness has its own very pleasant reward."