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Judson Evans

Change Machine

Because last night's late movie was The Minority Report, now at the grocery's change machine, I imagine in place of the screen asking if I want to proceed in English or Spanish, another composite screen, old fifties' radio tubes combined with high definition plasma that flickers each time something in the flow of coins toggles, coughs up in the grate and reconstructs layers of grainy images, each built from all it has touched: assemblage of keys orphaned of their twenty years of doors, the onyx tie clasp, the subway tokens from outdated turnstiles of desire, or the small copper ankh you gave me still encrypted with the panic of a sudden illness in a very other country–appendicitis, and added to the diagnosis, the word adhesions, which meant some part of us thought vestigial, an inert organ, had reattached, had made itself ache like something vital.

caught up
in the change
buttons and keys