A woman's bare white legs,
Cut off just above the knee,
The shine of her patent heels, the allure
Of the unseen. A telephone--
The old-fashioned kind--
Dropped in from the top edge of the frame.
It dangles, precariously, just above
A curious pair of round-rimmed spectacles
Resting on a glossy parquet floor.

How else to capture
The unlikely radiance of suns
Refracted through a carnival vendor's lineup
Of plastic goldfish baggies,
A black boy's white eyeballs
Popping from their dark sockets,
The pockmarked barrel of his No. 2 pencil
Forgotten on the desk, surrendered
To a dusty afternoon somnolence.

A Rottweiler in the bathtub,
Two long-haired men in dark
Suits, standing, in obvious discomfort, beside
a potted plant With a flower like a phonograph.

A girl in a purple veil. She ducks
Her head as she walks, following
The curvature of the scarred and
Dirtied city wall (and from which war?)
And tosses her matching handkerchief
Backwards over her shoulder.

One plain wooden chair stands upright
In the center of a bare plank floor.
Andy Warhol sneezes.
Instantly, in perpetuity.