Dayton Street

Remember when diapers were delivered
By a truck with a stork painted on it?
I still see that truck once in a while,
Like a sighting of the Goodyear blimp.

Or maybe I made that up;
Memory and reality don’t really mesh.

Crashing the Tupperware party,
I found more plastic.

But far be it from me
To denigrate time-honored traditions.

Take Velveeta cheese, for instance:
Plastic individually wrapped in plastic.
It fits nicely into your Tupperware.

In the back of my mind I knew what was coming
But I didn’t know that I knew.

The music added up to exactly nothing much;
It was trying to please too many people at once.

You can hear it back there,
Within you without you,

Hoping to play up a storm
But only invoking a light shower.

The sun shining through it
Created a beautiful rainbow.
I knew if I told her
She would come running out to see it.

Don’t take your time
And that tone with me,
Young man.

“Where’s my leg?” “Under the table.”

This dear man was very complete.

Ian Ganassi’s work has appeared recently or will appear soon in numerous literary magazines, including The American Journal of Poetry, Blazevox, Twisted Vine, Oddball, and Manhattanville Review, among others. His poetry collection, Mean Numbers, was published in 2016. His new collection, True for the Moment, is forthcoming from MadHat Press. He is a longtime resident of New Haven, Connecticut. Selections from an ongoing collaboration with a painter can be found at www.thecorpses.com.