Dents

“I want to thank the town of Van Horn,” Jeff Bezos said in his Post-Penis-Rocket-Flight Press Conference.

“This is a small, amazing little town. And you know, we’re making a dent in it.”

But do you know the dents you’ve already made

the ones that scratch through my neighboring streets of Seattle, clawed with cranes that stretch higher and higher

while the tents notch deeper and deeper.

Do you know the dents you’ve made in my hometown in Ohio, that time I drove by that shopping mall I used to work at,

only to find it occupied with parking lots of Amazon trucks.

Do you know the dents you’ve made in my ears from the piercing sound of my husband’s pager at three in the morning,

jolting me wide awake as I watched him respond to another goddamn call for his job at AWS.

Do you know the dents you’ve made in my mind, once stirred with imagination when I looked up at the stars at night,

now gouged with shipped boxes of band-aids to mask the scars overnight.

This is a small, amazing little planet, Jeff.

But do you know the dents you’ve made?