Huge Magazine: "Minnesota Series"

Minnesota Series
by Sean Colgin

Duluth

"Is this Minneapolis
or Saint Paul,"
I ask.

"It is neither."

Minnesota I

Another city
leaves like the last
a race
of windowsills, letterboxes,
streetlights,
busses and horns.
Another storm
breaks up and reforms
over shopping malls and noodle huts,
America,
the heartland of the soul.

Where is Minneapolis
from here?
Where is Paris or L.A.?
From Sibley street, where
exactly
is another city I know?

It's a nice town,
I remember while I am here:
Lake County, Lake of the Woods,
Lincoln, Olmsted, Otter Tail.
My feet drag like stones across sand.

Wabash street, a room with a view,
I leave footsteps behind me,
I have passed through
and am gone.

Minnesota II: Lunch

Fat and grainfed,
supple and obscene,
the women
of the midwest pass
me by, I eat
and drink: chips, fish
and Guinness.
A church, a fountain,
a waterfall,
Enrique Rojas and Oscar
de Leon, of the Association
of Operative Millers, from
Oaxaca or someplace,
gay men and waitresses,
a woman named Leigh
(what a beautiful name!),
Africans, busses (#1433 up Nicollet),
Minnesota like a spaceship
above me. And below me,
beneath the table,
my napkin, my hands in pockets
(where is my wallet?),
some lint, a kleenex,
walking shoes, shadow, cement,

Minnesota III

I met a guy
in the skyway who
did not have boundaries
or walls.
"It's a nice town," he said, and then
turned a different
corner than I.

A man stands at a window
and chatters
at frogs flying by.

"What city is this?"

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