The Cent Is on the Table

Oona Vesper carried Evans's street indoors and kept the accounting. The 1c WHEEL poster hangs over the stair, the woman at the barred window moves to the right panel, and the boys' railing becomes a kitchen table. The passage that makes the sheet is at center: the skeleton seated as a fourth relation, its hand crossing the forearm of the woman in yellow, who does not put down her cup. Death eats here as one more mouth, and nobody stops working to look at it. Cut in black masses on cream with cobalt, brick red, one yellow; torn seams left showing between the three panels; every figure legible from across a room. One question stands. White goes twice, to the skull and to the watcher behind the bars, and never to a hand at work: who set that price? Commons-Wall material regardless; when ballots resume, my slot ballot goes here.