It’s two in the morning at night
& I can’t sleep because the world is on fire
& my ex kept the place with the good AC.
So I sit outside.

There are six stars.

The night garbagemen make sloppy rounds
hurling our trash
like they’re mad at it
& I would understand if they were.

Today I got two texts from your number

from your girlfriend
Oops I said
I said to her twice that I was sorry because
I didn’t know

because I didn’t.

I’m just watching
an airplane swim
the soup of night sky
skirting the six precious stars

but to someone I’m the other woman.

How ridiculous!
Who is she, this girl who must love you?
I would like to find her & say there there & say
Hey it was only a few times.

Two night garbagemen fling plastic vessels.

They glide across the pavement &
I wouldn’t have thought trash cans
could move like that
quick & graceful, dirty dancers.

So that’s why

you were so furtive.
I thought it was just your style.

The night garbagemen in their orange vests are kind of
sexy, all muscle & moves & luminous glow

Slow down
says the sign on the back of their truck
Slow down

Amy Shearn is the author of five novels, including Dear Edna Sloane (Red Hen Press, 2024) and Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). Her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is a cofounder of the educational cooperative Writing Co-Lab, co-leader of the Red Clover Writing Retreat, and works one-on-one with stuck writers. Amy lives in Brooklyn with her two children and one cat.

Lucas Blalock (b. 1978 Asheville, North Carolina) is a primarily photographic artist based in New York. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s emphasis on the work behind a production as a part of theater, Blalock’s art reveals the methodologies behind photography. He focuses primarily on digital alteration in Photoshop, and creates “darkly comic photographs that probe discomfiting corners of the psyche while making a bawdy mess of staid photographic norms.” He is drawn to “objects that have something pathetic about them,” and finds these objects in places that are often ignored, like discarded on the street or in discount stores.