from To Restore a Dead Child

1

1925

Sometimes while I sleep

I hear the single cry and the tire screek

that never end.

My blond and foolish brown-eyed brother

lugging his fretful love

shambles after me

as the cunning Mack truck

lurching out of nowhere

cuts him down.

He's a long dead almost-three.

I'm a long lived five

just turned sixty-one

still running in a dead heat

with the rolling cab that swooped him up

heading for the vanished hospital.

It's then on waking

I feel the snot of infant faces

leak into my mouth.