☀ Today's Poem: "Facebook Marketplace" Lena Crown

St. Louis, MO

The boy with the couch and coffee table
had recently been left.

It came as a set, he said, She liked
midcentury modern, bought from Amazon.
The table legs splayed out just like a foal’s,
young and spindly—emulating, but only
emulating, instability.

Thirteen stories down, a jogger dodged
tectonic plates of concrete knocked askew
along the park, which stretched mutely toward
the horizon, the Arch a sterling thread
plucked loose from the seam.

Flush against the sliding door, I watched
the goings-on while Neen talked down the price.

I thought again, as I sometimes did while driving
down Skinker toward the highway, of the boy
who, years ago, high on coke or drunk and high
on coke, had leapt or slipped from a balcony here
and died. It felt new, to be conjuring him from inside.

The jogger’s feet ticked clockwise up the block.
The concrete sopped up the sudden weight of his
living, the intestinal weather and uneven stride.

Beside a young, braced tree, a bottle of wine
had bled arterial streams into the dirt.

Act like you’re not sure about the furniture,
Neena had coached me in the car, So he’ll go lower.

How could he know what we wouldn’t leave
without? We kept hidden, for now, that underground
Jonah idled in his cobalt Dodge, the bed
empty, awaiting the symbolic remnants
of the poor guy’s empty bed, tires straddling
two spaces across the white line, and
the storied body in the mineral regions
below the rubber and cement, still falling.