Some Timelines Last

The most expensive buildings in town look temporary now. Banks, luxury apartments, office buildings. Rectangles of glass and concrete assembled rather than made. I keep searching for carved leaves around a doorframe, for wrought iron twisted into vines, for the face of some stone creature condemned to stare at the street for two hundred years.

A gargoyle never looked like it had somewhere better to be.

The stone hands remain. Artistry outlived the craftsman. A hundred years from now, when the drywall has been replaced, the vinyl flooring torn up, the logos changed and changed and changed again, what survives us beside the earth we stood on? I wonder when beauty turned into an upgrade. I wonder who was in the room when that was decided.

Nicole Antillon is a poet based in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Bainbridge Island Press: POETICS, Neon Origami, Middle West Press, Beyond Words magazine, and Killer Nashville Magazine recently.