Aaron Balkan

Nice Nowhere

Listen to this poem

The new postage stamp is supposed to
keep its value forever.
Get high and look at that.

Take the young cowboy down to the green valley.
The snow melts when it hits the asphalt
and when it lands on grass
it only takes a few minutes more.

The dream is to walk across an alfalfa field
and get on an elevator.

And for it to be a seamless merging.
In a forest on the margin of a video game

about home decorating
in which pixels form snowflakes
along with other items
that shouldn’t cascade
into a living room

four runners-up for title of this poem are

A Joke about Race;
Masonic Lodge in the Rain;
Wives Read Tolstoy; &

Wallace Stevens, Seeing How He Writes Like a Photo of a Photograph,

gets up from the couch.
Open the shades!
Open the windows!
Take a sip.
Now take same sip
in a photograph.

After scaling the subtlest of handicap ramps,
God is.
You guess.
Let me kiss you
said she to other

she, the one not wearing the shirt that said
Cunts of the world: UNITE!

In that movie of Brakhage’s
time + silence =
jizz on celluloid.

It’s like the lesson I glean from Fargo:
to death, the money
does not freeze.

Is there anything you’d be unwilling, like Meat Loaf is unwilling,
to do for your art?

But tonight it’s just me and a half hour left
of part two:
A Ken Burns thing on Reagan.
Baseball metaphors are beneath David Gergen.