by Merry Speece
In a dream I waited for a number to rise on a large hand-drawn chart divided into three columns. I kept my eye on the middle column. The columns on either side began to fill, but the middle column, the one important to my own fortunes, remained empty throughout the designated time.
Then I understood that now the time was over, stop waiting. I had nothing, time to come to life.
Ben Bernanke came by. He took my hand and explained that he'd been forced to suppress the indicator that might have risen in the middle column. He'd had to do this to protect millions. The protection of millions makes more sense than the protection of what little I had had to start with.
Ben Bernanke has a good head on his shoulders. I've always been able to see that.
I looked into the eye closest to my right eye, his left. I looked not into pupil but into the white. The white of his eye was shot with blue, in one bright spot, blue rather than red, the bluest blue, opening up, the white in Ben Bernanke's eye, into sky.
Merry Speece has published two chapbooks of poetry and has been a recipient of a state arts commission fellowship in prose. Her Sisters Grimke Book of Days (Oasis Press, England), which one reviewer called a prose poem, is a work of fragmented historical scholarship.
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