it's a strip club called Despair
it's beside the highway, where two roads cross
one road is every mistake you ever made
one road is every mistake you'll ever make
The dumpster is on the same side of the building as the entrance.
Between them is a fiberglass umbrella table with parenthesis benches, and a coin-operated carousel with three shell horse-seats.
No more than eighteen feet of asphalt separate the entrance from the moaning highway.
The building used to be a modest, perfectly rectangular stucco house.
The detached garage with tar paper and gravel on the roof is a beer barn, legally separate in ownership.
They have two glass-door fridges and half a steel barrel full of ice and single cans.
They don't have a license for hard liquor.
The door is open and orange sunlight spills into the club, washing out the television and darkening the room.
The tables have long thin burns on their laminate faces.
Three men sit near the stage paying attention to their five-dollar steaks.
The dancer walks down the stage, puts out her hand, pivots around the steel pole, walks back to the other pole.
Three cardboard boxes gather dust stacked in a corner up against the stage.
The announcer drops his denim coat on the boxes every day.
The carpet is crewcut hotel-hallway nylon with grey paths worn from the entrance to the ATM to the men's room.
The men's room used to be half of a bedroom, partitioned with drywall.
The mirror over the sink is a rectangle of polished steel.
The plywood wall of the stall built around the toilet has a cutout for the radiator that couldn't be removed.
The brown paper towels are stacked on the toilet tank.
The price sticker is still on the side of the plastic wastebasket wedged between sink-pipe and radiator.
A pair of sodium bulbs droning loudly in clouds of insect worship stare out over the parking strip and paint each car one value of orange.
Cities glow far down the horizon in either direction.
The airbrushed plywood over the entrance has lightbulbs in her nipples.
she doesn't really work at Despair anymore
she just goes by to check on a couple of things
one is that the place is still there
one is that she isn't
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