Six-Year-Old Insomniac

The translucent slime of bad dreams

followed me to bed, reassuring that the

slender pink bellies of otherworldy animals

would come crawling from my dresser drawers

like worms; their bloodless rings of tissue exposed

in the stagnant, black air.

Eyes like slits I'd paralyze my own bones,

waiting for the wriggling masses,

the hiss to encircle my ankles

until my mother's fingers chased the bad thoughts out,

tracing half-moons on my lower back at night

when the only place I could find sleep

was within the grasp of her flannel pajamas.

Brother

Sooo...my 3 posts per week plan totally failed. Woops. But here's a poem I wrote last winter as a companion to one of the very first poems I ever posted. They are both "persona poems" written from the imagined consciousness of someone else.

Brother

He left his Converse sneakers

by the front door

laces tied, toes scuffed

and hung himself with a black belt

in our garage.

January is when it rains and

I think about God,

who sired all the trees that stand

like seal-skinned skeletons,

refusing to grow.

I select ratchets, take tires

on and off; the whorls of

my fingerprints blackened by

the stain of motor oil

that will not wash away.

When my father stands over me,

his callused hand like 80-grit sandpaper

on the back of my neck,

I can tighten a lug nut and know

we are not alone.