How I Sleep

With the fuse box
still locked shut
and the refrigerator
door wide open,
a single bug who walks
the wall of bent nails
and frames, keys on hooks
that are bones
tapping from wind.

The joints of the beams
in this place know
people die in the dark.
Air in the hallway
never moves at all, hangs
from gallows of
ceiling tiles.

I sleep with a wooden
baseball bat, a map of Mexico
carved into its red paint,
next to my hand
under the sheet, keep beacons
of Virgen de Guadalupe
glowing the attic.


Witnesses

We jump the barrier, barefoot toward the ocean,
walk the cliff rim, a range twisted naked in any event.
The clear sky does not care for constraint.

In the howling
from broken heads of dandelions,
we're always perfectly here, assured,
as branches of a red brush in the morning.