Breakfast is a single tangerine

grown in the winter, he imagines it’s good and enough.

​

His wife puts some coffee on.

She’d be an aged thing now, were she real.

​

Shrewish shih tzu shakes off icy-handed pats now.

Shake, doggy, shake, doggy, shake off my love.

​

The dog, haughty, trundles off to sleep,

dreams of masters who use words like firmament.

​

He reminds himself that firmament is just

a fancy word for sky. He would use it, too,

​

the fancy word, were it not for the sink

being broken and cold-

​

cracked walls descending glacially upon him. A town

where you just sleep

​

at night, that’s him.

If he were to disappear,

​

he’d write a note: to all the royalty

I never did meet, my father and his father

 

gave me this name and this tangerine,

this leaky sink and sinking home,

 

gracefully aging nonexistent wife, a shih tzu

who does not accept my love.

 

I want you to know, beneath

this firmament, it is good and enough.

​

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