Jacob Montgomery

ASTRONOMY

Cross city, must arrive by bus
by nine for dinner

I am calling everything dinner
My job is dinner

Dinner starts at nine
Mother made us group dinner

I sat in my chair, my dinner
touched fork to spoon

Now I dine remote
I imagine dinner, often spaghetti

with commercials     A nice thrum
helps to feel less dinner

and after dinner I wait
for more, and during

my desk, I discuss dinner
with my coworkers

We work in dinner
—the industry is stable—

at our dinners, typing
memos for the bulletin

Some have a spouse or a dinner
waiting on a bed

of red dinner, candles dim
is what I imagine

I am often alone, but not
in my thoughts nor

in the joys of social
nor fulfilled, no, and if a thought

does come, it is a shadow of
a black and white dinner

with numbers, 1, 3, 8, 10
a shadow of family dinners

the way some people
dinner a smooth glass apartment, a ceiba tree

or millions of cardboard
boxes, stacked in rows

Dinner, they might say, is
a shadow of sex     Dinner desires

not me, not even close
I spend my waking life at dinner

and rarely do I think of
anything but that which I can taste

and the dinner that will set me up
for the next dinner, a goal

of concrete     I look at the sky
and see the many dinners

and their fires, dinnering down at me
I fear a day

without carpet or window or desk
Dinner without dinner

What would I say to dinner then
How would I survive

JACOB MONTGOMERY currently lives in Cobleskill, New York. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.