Market Street

by Pattabi Seshadri

I was walking home
down Market Street at midnight
at the end of a long night of drinking.
That late, the city becomes
a museum of shop windows
filled with shimmering goods
strung with wire
into unstable pyramids,
freeze-framing the moment of peak desire
beneath giant photographs
of smiling, sweating,
dancing demigoddesses,
eyes, lips, and teeth
ten times human size.

Even the office buildings were still lit,
bronze-clad 19th-century bank buildings,
their statue-niched facades sliced off
and replaced with sheets of glass
to consecrate the transparency
of the company’s culture,
each Apple ProDisplay monitor
gleaming in blade-thin profile on its desk
like a knife resting on an altar,
and beneath them,
the ergonomic chairs
swathed in black netting,
backrests arching
like the wings of crouched angels.

I said to them
“I have a wife and child.
I am no longer a member
of the church of desire.
I have no place here
and neither does my family.
Why are you burning
your lights for me?
What are you asking me to do?”

They said nothing.
I could hear nothing
but the buzz of their voltage,
as if they were just beginning
to say a word,
a word that I wouldn’t live to hear.

Pattabi Seshadri‘s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and other journals. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.