Follow the wrecking ball: in a month, it will smash into this glass like that housefly. A blueprint unfolds on a table beside an orchid doubled- over with white blooms, and out the window, just half a bridge dives into the front page of a newspaper the neighbor lifts from her balcony. Partial to more, we're beckoned outward, beyond the foundation: and a new picture window will jut over the cliff to frame all the Golden Gate's red seismograph, which cuts through the fog to the headlands. In a year, in wingback chairs we'll sit in the air high above those tiny people strolling the crumbling sill down on Bay Street, out there where the orchid's reflection hovers with a flock of gulls.
From View from a Temporary Window by Joanie Mackowski. Copyright © 2010 by Joanie Mackowski. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.