For Sale, Used

At a corner store downtown you can buy

a freshly refurbished soul-compacting machine

with brushed nickel finish. High volume capacity,

over seven billion psi, high-pitched cry muffler.

Fully updated, but you can still see the original

German craftsmanship. It’s got a pigmentation

isolator, resistance suppressor, purity indicator.

Lots of optional accessories too: night vision adaptor,

snake or stripe decals, national anthem calliope

powered by the goddamn gas exhaust, I kid you not.

You can take care of just about everything with it.

And all you need’s this skin and your Real ID.

---

DAN ALBERGOTTI is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as two chapbooks from Unicorn Press: The Use of the World (2013) and Of Air and Earth (2019). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Five Points, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry 2017, and two editions of The Pushcart Prize, as well as other journals and anthologies. He is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.