Adam Tavel

Cabinet has an unfortunate face. It doesn’t help that her name is Cabinet, and she is one, too, so when she speaks, little flutter-thuds of drawers muffle her voice, irretrievably. Mr. Sweets, our morning custodian, insists she always greets him by saying: forthwith spelunk the zebra. Sometimes middle management can be glimpsed through her lone square pane, squatting on the desktop, reaming her fuller. Straggled and spinster-flat, her hair is a honeycomb of overlapping sticky notes. Her greatest gift is turning any lone form into three, immediately. We take turns, stiffened in her vexing chair, hoping to glimpse the depths of her paneled dark, all that wood and lacquer, where shadows spew out forms and close. Her face is like a postcard of the desert, Mr. Sweets once said at lunch, the kind best kept for a bookmark. The rumor is at night she sits inside our vacant high-rise pretending she’s an altarpiece. As if it could be holy without us. As if we’d trust her with some sacrament.

If you’re going to San Francisco be sure to wear a flower for the greasy bay’s conflagration, like in Turner’s painting, where all of Parliament roars a catastrophic orange melting bareboned in the flames, orange like the birth of starlight in a galaxy where bosses shit down your neck to thick applause, the kind best reserved for closing night, onstage the feme fatale, herself the tusk she gores you with, the smile she gives your bleeding perfect teeth, Caligula when displeased the story goes scimitarred hands from soldiers and strung them into necklaces reddening the air, let’s stop there, in the lower corner Turner paints the London poor so brown and stooped they’re hidden in shoreline reeds, staring as their river quenches all the burning yeses, nos, and cold abstentions, it would have been fire-horses frothing down the cobblestones, imagine that, my father did, they made him study it in firefighter school, imagine hooves whipped mad to scatter boys like you, he’d say, who tried to catch the screams that sounded theirs and failed, with hooves behind them loud as gunshots through the tenements, their faces at the bricks.