The Bureau of Exchange
Lucas Jorgensen | Poetry
Someone figured out a way to live forever, but it was costly, a complex matter of accounting.
You burned an hour off your life in a cigarette’s minute, but got a half-second rebate for each
kilometer paced on smoke break.
Subtracting speed’s saved time, car-reliance taxed the average American a decade—The same
quantity credited for falling in love, until love failed, and the checkbook of the heart balanced, went
bankrupt, broke.
Prozac reinvested every second spent sweating how much you got for eating broccoli minus how
much you lost for dousing it in cheese, the conversion rate on selling blood plasma for heart-pill
money.
A cult formed, passing one kidney back and forth among its congregants, working and worshiping,
going into debt.
All was up, up, up, until collections reeled the cashline in.
They brought an armored truck, a platoon of IV bags.
Someone figured out a way to live forever.
The rest of us bled life’s savings.
Lucas Jorgensen (he/him) is a poet and educator originally from Cleveland, Ohio. In 2023, he was a winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. He received his MFA from New York University and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas where he teaches and studies poetry. His work has previously appeared in Poetry, Literary Hub, The Massachusetts Review, and The Southeast Review, among others.