Don’t tell your mother when she visits
home that I sleep beneath frayed house
shoes, under floorboards, noticing
creaks. Or how I pulled the trigger

here, to my chest, and after how you
fled along the highway, dropping a second
.40 though, out the window (still loaded with a slug
meant for you) where tire-marked
mutts bleed, sinking with wild sage

growing in blacktop
weeds. Tell her I watch you crawl
into your bed and still try to keep you
warm, beside your father. Still living

behind these walls I feel his thumbs
press into my skin, (closing
bullet belly-holes) while my icy fingers sew
him a new pair of wrists. Ask your mother, why she forced
separate beds on her lover-mate, and why

the running pink from his arms still stain
our kitchen sink. Let her heavy *****
know, (it's not her fault) she
shoved us from this single-bath

American rancher, with one foodstamp
still hidden in her blue-jean back
pocket and with the Walmart all the ways across
a black-clouded interstate. Make sure

she welcomes these trapped ghosts hanging on
wooden clothesline-pinned sheets, swaying
with wind gusts from the highway where unlucky stray dogs
bleed, sinking with wild sage growing in blacktop weeds.