STANDARD DEVIATION

Tonight the old country feels
much like the new country

felt, the gaspetrol station neon
and short selling its fuels

the newscopters fluctuate
through the riverside suburb

the billboard’s skylit rendition
of palm trees from the coastal

visible through glass apartments—
flats, half-used, their owners

moving through them like dust—
backchatter of rotor blades

again today and the random
streettargetings of passers-by-

but you know all this. As I fold
my clothflag four ways crowds

outside domed structures hum
univocal, a sound like prayer or

a call to prayer. If we’d begun
with flowers colouring the streets.

The part of sunset called after-
thought. Tonight the old country

has the new country’s tectonic
unrest. Pulling away from itself

at the seams of the river while
the billboards resolutely decline

to shift. Something wanted in bold
type but impossible to name or find.

A 2019 NEA Literature Translation Fellow, Lytton Smith is the author most recently of The Square, winner of the 2020 NMP/Diagram Chapbook Contest. He has translated several books from the Icelandic, including Andri Snær Magnason's recent work on climate change, On Time and Water, and he is a member of the international Hostile Environments: Policy, Stories, Responses research group. He lives in Rochester, NY, home since 2014.