JESSICA GOODFELLOW
NIGHTSCAPE WITH RANDOM INTERSECTION
Late at night a telephone booth
becomes a cage, a trap—
its overhead bulb a spotlight.
Someone has been watching me—
a pantless man. He body-slams
the folding door. Dropping
the phone, I whirl around,
push back collapsing panels.
A scramble, a scuffle,
a struggle. Then, dead-
lock—his weight pushing in
equal exactly to my fear
pushing out. The thin layer
of glass between us
shakes. The dangling phone
behind is useless—no
free
hand.
Late at night a telephone booth
is a glass elevator in free fall
to hell. I howl. The half-naked man,
purple and furious, swears.
Our bodies strain on opposite sides
of a quarter inch of brittle glass.
I press, desperate, against the door.
Leering, he matches his palm to mine,
his naked thigh—the warped reflection
of a horror house mirror.
He shudders. It shatters
my world, my translucent life.
Late at night a telephone booth
becomes a glass casket.
I bury it again and again—
but it surfaces from the muck
where I kneel, dirt-fisted,
shackled to this endless task.
Meanwhile, the pantless man
has pulled on some trousers
and walks now among you,
nodding, shaking your hands.
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (2015) and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (2014). She’s had work in Best New Poets, The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and Motionpoems. In 2016 she was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preser