Aaron Landsman
Rust Belt Forger
O hotel of industrial glamour
and denial–you were a shelter.
You held and shed histories
like the puke smell that built up
between tiles in the morning.
Someone had to clean it; caustic soap
sloshed and masked after bodies
that showered roughly, received
grace, punched out, finally departing
toward fits, to become useless tools
themselves. We are meant to take pride
in the inventive machine
that tortured us, as if it landed
in this lobby shined by magic,
complete with celebratory wall text
by an imagined laborer. We are
smelted of nightmares. The typography
radiates the finest authenticity
money can buy. No one’s fingers
were harmed by this font. The story’s
a forgery, a fire let go, a crack
in the cement floor burnished
for effect. We still slough ash, but
into our mouths now. The band on tour
snores next door, their shift over, too.
The sky steels the sun. O thread count,
I lie in you, smell free coffee;
time to check out, inhabit
my new jacket and ideas
that resell frontier myths. The clerk
asks about my stay and I say
the repetitions erase me.
I say who’s the bum now?
Aaron Landsman makes performances, poems and other objects of attention. He is a recent Guggenheim Fellow in Theater, a current Abrons Arts Center Social Practice Artist-in-Residence and is working on a new project called Night Keeper, about insomnia as a superpower.
Reach out: @thinaar; gram, twit, and .com.