The Beauty Of A Strip Mall Poem by Richard Cole

is the beauty of a minor
dream turned quietly
aside at the end of the day,
the beauty of the small,
impossible ledgers recording
hope against subtraction and finally
closed with a sigh.

Every unremarkable donut shop
is somebody’s act of faith,
and somewhere between almost and
never quite, in the last miles
of aging neon and plastic
backlit signage, here
too is poetry, where the books
will someday be balanced and the future
is always a bargain, everything
ninety nine cents.