Originally published in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day poets.org. 2022.
A hallway full of shadeless lamps suddenly goes dark
Upon the simultaneous bursting of the globes.
Glass is everywhere, and so thin it forgets
To reflect even the tiny glimmer of your
Matchlight as you pull out your wish
Cigarette.
This is it. The immediacy of the final desire.
I know the dead I know where ghosts go
to feel at home in the float
And how they commune with the living
through the lightswitch
or the smells of honeysuckles off
the highway upstate
I say
But you don’t
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