People also say this is Paradise.
          What sort of Paradise doesn’t have puddles?
                    —Josh English

Paradise comes with muddy pawprints, static,
insomnia, tired brooms, bus fumes hovering
over the still frozen town. Unruly lilies shoot up
through late snow on the cemetery hillside.

A ripe fan blows grease into the alley
out back of the lone Mexican restaurant in town,
where the hostess on break hunches against the cold,
cupping her cigarette with lovely hands.

She’s skinny with generalized denial, and anyone
could love that, don’t you think? She rents
in Paradise or its outskirts, I’m sure of that.
Just watch her eye the three sixtyish secretaries

at their regular Wednesday lunch, all puffy hands
and throaty laughter. Dye jobs just past
their sell-by dates. She could love such weary mothers
easily, but chooses the sky instead, cloud puffs

echoing her exhalations. That’s a zero-G Eden
up there, free of lime slices jamming bottlenecks,
the damnation of sticky linoleum, lint in a purse
puffed up like a secretary’s hair. She likes to think

of nothing, long moments weightless as the check
floating down cloudlike over a table. She’s smoke
obscuring the sky’s cracked mirror. Maybe the snap
of a lock bolt at closing time, and the moment after.

That sort of Paradise. Fritos still in their gleaming bag
at the very top of the brimming dumpster.