By Emily Banks

It was everything I didn’t have
and all I wanted. 

If I could have it
I knew I would have all
I didn’t have and everything
I wanted. 

It was a key to the city
of dreams, a hacker’s code
in a hackneyed spy film,
a sleek black rectangle
of plastic with no limit I could slip
into my back pocket. 

I wasn’t wrong. I found it.
Doors did open
and chairs were gestured free.
I saw carpets roll out in strangers’ eyes. 

They flock like moths to artificial light.
It tickles me, how they brush their tattered wings
on my glass skin, fiends for the bright,
willing even to die— 

I can make anyone
tell me everything
I want to hear
for a night. 

They hate me when they learn I’m not the sky.  

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Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, CutBank, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from Emory University. She lives in Indianapolis and teaches at Franklin College.