The Town
Jessica Poli


Someone had told us that in the forest by the lake lived replicas of everyone in the town. We decided to search for them, and did so slowly and mathematically. Along the way we found new, unused bicycle parts, boxes of teeth and bones, and dozens of mirrors wrapped in cellophane. Every object was a clue that we inspected inch by inch.

At a place where the ground splits into a narrow gorge, we climbed the steep center and found a young couple groping each other beside a scenic babbling brook. We asked them for directions but they didn't pay us any attention, only twisting their bodies together even more intricately. There were more couples upstream, and on the other side of the gorge we found a whole town, but no one looked familiar. We never found ourselves, but we'll keep looking.






Jessica Poli's chapbook of poems, GLASSLAND, is just out from JMWW. A chapbook of prose, ALEXIA, is forthcoming from Sixth Finch.

Detail of collage on main page courtesy of Joana Coccarelli.





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