myself from the top of a stairwell / not one full body / but slivers of hand & wrist
as a montage of security footage / skewed / walking out of the frame
or as the neighbors hear me / absent when not pacing / fucking / shouting
the sum total of minutes spent in stairwells / as a currency
we are not poor
blanching the day / as turning a jar will empty it of water
Allyson Paty is the author of the chapbook The Further Away ([Sic] Detroit, 2012). Her poems can be found (or will soon appear) in Tin House, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Sixth Finch, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. She is from New York.