Colin Dodds is a writer. His work has appeared in more than 250 publications, been anthologized, nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, and praised by luminaries including Norman Mailer and David Berman. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.

The Catering of the Mid-Level Archons

A party—wine and beer
and talk pent up to spend on us
who survived the fourth quarter

Chugging from a fire hose
in the warm winter of a gyrating empire
aware that no asshole gets their own fire hose
to drink from for too long

Even with a little lobster salad in your slip-on shoe
there’s no safe step on the greasy pyramid
for us accomplices to the moral, aesthetic and spiritual
consequences of the camera

We get what we make: luxury news, pearl-fed pork chops
beauty goals, exclamation points like shell casings
good clothes pulled on in cold dawn and carefully curated bullshit
to talk at the gorgeous vistas where unimaginable vastness
meets unimaginable junk

Dusk on the rippling water alive as light on animal eyes
The kind of beauty that overturns the shit the scientists
bosses and all-purpose bastards insist we were,
for better or worse, rigged for

Shedding altitude over the sharks and starfish
jets in from Jersey runoff tides of the least-loved fishermen
form a queue clearer than the plane of the goddamn ecliptic
high astride stacked office lights burning late and bright
among slapdash stars who’ve never shared their language
and likely never shall

Down here
some motherfucker saying numbers
makes the lights line up