Kevin Hyde

Minneapolitan

Outside the airport I saw grass, tall and thick as sugar cane

or the British Open’s shaggy rough, more fun than the hard-edged

lawns of the East Coast. A girl told me the state suffered an acne

of lakes, that ten thousand oily ponds pockmarked the landscape.

I was initiated into the cult of Chipotle by three women who told me

the tacos were a revelation. On the walls metal profiles of fake Aztecs

wagged tongues and seemed to say, Have you ever seen a city so clean?

So devoid of human sacrifice? Vis-à-vis Philly: fewer bodies, less piss.

At night people drank at the hotel’s rooftop bar and I worried that beer

at such an altitude might bubble harder, be more filling. Some dude

speculated on what metropolitan egg had split to yield the Twin Cities.

St. Paul, across the river, leered like a wallflower, a city-shaped specter.

The knob of my room’s air-conditioner went down to fifty degrees,

lizard-blood cold. I figured what my per diem came out to per minute.

The one window’s three panes split the skyline into a triptych, left to right,

of brown cranes, insurance billboards, and the Metrodome’s parachute roof.

Kevin Hyde has recent or forthcoming work at McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Eyeshot, Burnt Bridge, and Big Fiction. He lives in Pennsylvania.