Jeremy Schmidt

Schedule B

Artificial teeth, ceramic sinks
electric insulators and washbasin pedestals
flush tanks, greeting cards, burley tobacco, tomatoes, fresh or chilled, threading
or tapping machines, gloves, mittens, and mitts, metal halide lamps, popcorn, unpopped, 
	and silicates
chickens weighing not more than two thousand grams each, live
instant print film in rolls, film without perforations
birdsfoot grass seed, licorice roots, building bricks, conduits
coarse-grained earthenware, provitamins, slag.

		•

Every item of information,
every family within each district and not otherwise,
every dwelling-house, actual inquiry, randomly selected sample,
every subsequent term of ten years in such manner. A just and perfect enumeration.
Answers will only be used, and all particulars,
for statistical purposes and no other purpose:
each and every item, looked up in perfect silence
according to their respective numbers.

Jeremy Schmidt is an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Chicago. His poems and essays have appeared in The Believer, Lana Turner, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Oversound, and he was selected by John Ashbery for the 2014 Boston Review / “Discovery” Poetry Award.