WHERE THE BAD FOLKS GO WHEN THEY DIE
Whatever is intimate to that body
I mean the human that was
Air and flesh
No longer a mind but
Here we go spitting among
The Crickets in heat
Reminding ourselves that the beer
Tastes better cold and the lives we live
Are much
Tuna salad on toast
7:44pm EST on a Tuesday
Standing at a self checkout in Target
Market Street, Everywhere
Put your apples in the
If they don’t register, it never happened
Wait for an employee, for assistance
I’ve been alive for 35 years
It is absolutely a blip
On the machine
Of my car the salt sticks and tires
Deep exhale when freezing
I’m writing again
But no sun since August
CBD is a maybe imagined fix but
I take what I can get
A free salad
Lisa sends me home
With a bottle of wine
And my dad
Seems smaller
Or is it the idea
That his younger brother is gone
And these stories
That are still stories
Are no longer living
And my father
Who keeps me alive
Was the older brother
Selfish I feel for thinking
Of my own
Potential loss
Air in the tire again each weekday
Habitual lamp shopping
Online orders arriving the next day
I keep it with me
The memory of almost nothing
Reaching a hand out to bag
The life
Feel the pressure and weight
Make my dad some toast
To be the child who loves
To watch the parent eat
Becomes maternal
The way I feel listening
To Willa eating apple slices
In bed if only to stay awake
Ten more minutes
A refrain with which I’m familiar
Russell on the unicycle, smoking a pipe
An image I never saw
Once I was a member of a family
I never knew
When I sit up
The water glass breaks
I realize that wasn’t him in the story
Further away in the night
(Seems) brittle
Stones popped up under tires
My neighbor’s bicycle stereo
Ignites the air with a song I’d forgotten