I write in bed.

Awake with wordy breath and ink stained pillows

Sheets gather round bedposts

Memory foam indents, waiting to forget

Imbedded in rhythm, lifting the popular song of life.

The Last Place They’ll Look

Baby aspirin for breakfast

Heads shape and shift
Concern with the phone
Voices muffle and spider plants dangle

Middle rack for a pillow
Heads become faces familiar, hidden in the stove

Snake Bite Kit.

Perfect circle hickey

On my face

Purple oozes blue

My big brother

What a dick

Halloween 1981

I am Honest Abe in my school’s fall performance titled

Lincoln: The Head Beneath the Hat. My family is thrifty so I wear the same costume for Halloween. 

Dressed as a ghost in a fitted sheet, my brother is my escort.

As long as we stay in the horseshoe-shaped housing tract with its cul-de-sac teats, we are safe.

After the first few candy bars drop into my pillowcase, I run past the next house because it’s Trevor’s house, and he and his dad scare me. Before I reach the next door I hear a rustle,  

like the sound of Sheila Stipes’ prematurely developed body as it whisks against her sweat suit in gym class.

Unfortunately it’s not Sheila, and I discover the sound is a large rock slingshotted at my jaw.

I deflate with a head full of hurt and hollow. Voices warped by warm wires arc in my mind and mock my name. I grasp the rock.

My ear bleeds down my cheek and I’m lifted into a wood- paneled hearse that doubles as our Plymouth station wagon.

To this day, when I come across that rock in my old stuff,

I remember there is a John Wilkes Booth Jr. still running amok.