By Giles Goodland
Undrawn curtains: people laying tables, changing, as for a night’s work. You see a person in your room, wearing your expression. He has received the news you were always waiting for, and there is another there, on the bed, who you cannot see, but as the second splits past you resolve it must be time to go home and in reaching for the stop-button the bus accelerates, throwing you to the floor, and when you pick yourself up you are in another landscape, from which there is no walking back.
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Giles Goodland's books include Of Discourse (Grand Iota 2023), A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001), Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012), and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). Civil Twilight was published by Parlor Press in 2022. He has worked as a lexicographer, editor, and bookseller, and teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University's department of continuing education, and lives in West London.