From Replica of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue, Fall 1900
Department of Purchase and Disease
Ghost in the yard, early morning,
the hammock swinging on its own. Rather,
I saw myself reflected in the window
and wanted it to be a ghost, early morning,
the hammock filled with wrens.
Any sign would be enough.
The childhood fear returns, you’re thinking,
nostalgia buried within, held to the shallows
but it’s more complicated.
This is 1900.
There are many things to purchase.
There’s more than just dying here.
Disease is a good enough excuse,
but this isn’t disease.
We just don’t know we’re changing,
or what we’re changing into.
From Replica of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue, Fall 1900
Department of Taxidermy
The land is an incarnation
Like a hand on a hand on an arm asking do you know me?
—Fanny Howe
Sometimes I try to see the city as a taxidermist would: the wind as armature announces the skin, pigeons stain the air, graph and vein in the bread factory’s cloak. Underneath it all the landscape, orphan tissue, pelt trussed with rebar and lung, arsenic bodies where every parking lot used to be a house, every foundation a grove of elm. Here, the buried cobblestones are coughing through the asphalt. Here, the buried slaves are coughing up the graves that built them.
~
To make a dead hill mimic a living one there must be some minor immortality. One thousand glass eyes down the sleeves of the Confederate re-enactors guarding the Lee monument, an implied movement of wing, of tail, but even movement is a form of property, the anarchist says. Herons mounted on the island across from the old hydro plant could be mistaken as malfunction. Ownership congealed with nonbeing. I own yet I am nothing.
~
This neighborhood could still kill me if it wanted to. The dealer with the blue eyes of a foal. The old woman with the Army pack and the hunting knife running for the bus. She said hello to me yesterday and it hurt to know her like this. My neighbor found a human hipbone in his crawlspace. Not mine, but might as well be. The grackles mouthed chicken bones in the street and brought them to my yard to invent a finer bird, coaxed from the gristle, the hydrangea.
~
There must be a better way to keep the animals with us. Aren’t ghosts enough? The fur-rimmed shawl of night is a warmth, not a darkness. When there is another darkness, I’ll admit it. What makes you think I’m enjoying this? I say arsenic but I mean memory, or governance, some kind of control over the night. I mean childhood.
~
Sometimes it gets lonely here. There is rain, and there isn’t. The river tells us nothing, absolutely nothing. It floods, it dries. It does what rivers do. I want more from it, it’s got to know more, smuggled under the floorboards. An animal bed in a holy room. All those years underneath it. There is no better life. There is this. The dogs bark, but not for us.
—For Ann Marshall 
Joshua Poteat has published two books of poems, Ornithologies (Anhinga Poetry Prize, 2006) and Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World (University of Georgia Press, 2009), as well as a chapbook, Meditations (Poetry Society of America, 2004). He has been a Visiting Writer at Virginia Commonwealth University, and from 2011-2012, was the Donaldson Writer in Residence at The College of William & Mary. Currently, Joshua is a copy editor/copywriter at The Martin Agency. In collaboration with the designer Roberto Ventura, he creates light- and text-based installations that have appeared in shows at Randolph Macon College, 1708 Gallery, and for Richmond, Virginia’s InLight, which won Best in Show, 2009. Originally from Hampstead, North Carolina, Joshua lives in Richmond, Virginia, with the writer Allison Titus and their four dogs.
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