Little Money
Delivery
Houses, Your House
TV

Little Money

Fried at Whole Foods
I buy Laura flowers
Scan the cheap ones
And choose a better bunch
A lone green
Petal curls, a new rule
Deeper down
The poison lily, milky
Alive as ever
Holding water,
Stars, I love them leaning near
Held up there,
Royals
Absorbing food
I love to spend my money on a flower
Get sucked in
While she sleeps
Cut its yellow light with a knife
Feeling bigger
Slide it in
Among the others
I love to lie like this
Against the limit
Browsing the bright basement
To spend beyond
Cold and whole, to glide
Little on the elevator
Avoiding grime
Carrying them
Returning home
I fill a dimming room
With a flower when I enter
A sturdy one the sun
The little fuzz it has, lit
Dying like that
Any ageless day
But it’s this one, slow,
Rootless as a cloud
And harder
Odd house
For the calico
Shoving her splotched head
Into their new water
Her different beauty
Closing space in secret
I love to fake my freedom
So my balance shrinks
Like water drying
It’s my revenge
Obviously
I love a flower in my face
Breathing past the shadows of its freakish traits

Delivery

There’s something about a person
at home midday, receiving an order,
not hearing their voice from the van.
The tulips handed over,
silent, yellow and green,
leaving their long history
in the warehouse, the truck,
the dirt entirely.
The days when their young
stems were rooted
in rows, or waves,
deep, held and changing, not seeing
the customer’s face, really,
a blur of hair or half an arm
as I wait outside their home,
holding my phone.
My coworker making her way
back to me, the only one
walking for miles,
the moving sea mute.
It’s when I’m alone
in the white van
and I dip just briefly
back into my privacy
I feel most new to the city.

Houses, Your House

The telephone network
starts in your house.
A pair of copper wires
runs from a box at the road
to a bridge at your house.

From there, the red and green pair
connects to each phone.
If your place has two lines,
then two separate pairs
run from the road to your house.

The second is usually yellow
and black inside your house.

Sound waves from the voice
compress and decompress
the granules, changing their resistance
and modulating the current
flowing through the mic.

A thick cable will run
directly to the company
or it will run to a box
the size of a refrigerator
that acts as a concentrator,
digitizing your voice
at 8,000 samples per second,
then combining your voice
with dozens of others
to send them all down a single wire.

The division of a city
into small cells allows
extensive frequency reuse
across a location
so that millions of people
can speak simultaneously.

Any real phone contains
a coil or something
functionally equivalent
to block the sound
of your own voice
from reaching your ear.

TV

One man slides his hand
down the length of a counter.
He talks about his relationship,
concerned, agitated,
then he’s silent.
Fruit sits in a bowl,
waxed, flawless and raw.
I like the character
because I feel more
inclined to behave like him
or decide that I have, in the past,
acted in comparable ways
when living with people.
By the end of the episode,
I prefer the woman’s personality.
I like her especially
in the last scene
when she loses it,
stands up and leaves,
centering the hidden crew.
The sky changes,
but it’s planned.
A truck pulls up with food,
like something new will happen.

Emily Hunt’s works include the chapbook Company (The Song
Cave, 2019), the photography book Cousins (Cold Cube Press,
2019), and the full-length poetry collection Dark Green (The Song
Cave, 2015). She teaches poetry workshops in New York.

Note: “Houses, Your House” includes phrases from TCP/IP and
Distributed System by Vivek Acharya (Firewall Media, publisher
of Computer Science & IT books, 2008).