How Much Can a Banana Cost?
A price, such as a rent or wage, that remains
fixed, recurring and agreed on for a long
period of time eventually becomes a ghost.
The agreed upon amount no longer exists in any
real way even as your boss still pays the number.
The number is no longer the same. Each time you pay
your landlord the number, the number invisibly
changes, becomes less the number you stated
when you started paying. Just stating your wage,
after a year or two, becomes a kind of nostalgia,
a lie you tell yourself about the distance
between yourself and the past. Worse,
the number becomes a lie the market
tells you about the distance between
yourself and the past. Worse, the real
marker between yourself and the past;
the dead; have no mention in this equation,
just the infinitesimal and invisibly mounting
lied about number. The best part; eventually
you cannot understand any number in the world,
because your frame of reference for the cost of
an hour or a day or fifteen hundred square feet is twenty
years ago, two thousand miles away, and one day
you find yourself asking about the cost of a one
bedroom, embarrassing yourself, guessing what
was once a month but is now an hour.
Briefcase Feelings
Listen: this is how the world ends:
When I buy a shoe I don’t need made by
a child I don’t know who also did not
need the shoe. Getting the shoe to me
costs the child’s country’s annual carbon
emissions. When it’s a day late I write a bad
review.
We’re twenty years from agricultural collapse
asking each other how the world will end,
we’ve done it a million times already.
All a wage means is I’ve imbricated
strangers in my immiseration in order
to afford immiserating them.
This is exchange. As you are on fire, I sell you
water at the price of setting me on fire.
And the state laughs on the 1 and 3.
First and fifteenth. Future smelted dignitaries
attempt to negotiate the temperature
at which they’ll melt.
When negotiating with fire make sure you’re
the one holding it. We are coming home again.
Leave a light on.
These poems were co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Brendan Joyce is a poet and essayist from Cleveland, Ohio. His poetry has been featured in Lithub, Protean, Poetry Daily, the Atlantic, and the Poetry Society of America. He is the author of three books of poetry: Character Limit (2019), Love & Solidarity (2020), and Personal Problem (2023), and the co-organizer of the press Grieveland.
