Say the senator meets me
in the lobby of my building. Say he
stretches out his hand. Say there
is something midwestern vampiric
about him, a glow of suspirian blood
in his eye sockets, an oil spill
of Nick Cave hair.  Say he holds my hand
more firmly than he should, never
breaking eye contact. Say his nails dig
into my palm. Say he thanks me
and thanks me and I don’t know why,
then takes my elbow lightly in his hand,
guides me to the elevator. Say when the
doors close his body unspines and slips
unclouded and molten into the cavities of
its self, into the cavities of my self. Say I
wake on the balcony near a table cluttered
with a tray of cherrystones, littlenecks,
that sturgeon with the crème fraîche and
bacon-infused bread crumbs. Say the
senator is gone but has conjured a 200 year
old bottle of Pinot Noir scavenged from a
shipwreck in the Baltic Sea and it reaches
out for me with the mouthfeel of a
makeshift hospital, an undimmable
bouquet of evac and silencer and signal
flare. Say the balcony beckons and I
swoon to the railing. Say 32 stories below
the floodlights erupt with thousands of
people searching for the shade of a new
false father, the dawn of a brighter
deceiver.

*

Adam Fell is the author of DEAR CORPORATION, which will be published in Fall 2013 by H_NGM_N Books. His first book of poetry I AM NOT A PIONEER (H_NGM_N Books 2011) was awarded the Posner Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He lives in Madison, WI, where he teaches at Edgewood College and co-curates the Monsters of Poetry Reading Series.