It’s two in the morning and I’m listening to something in the yard.
Squirrels? Throwing soup cans at each other?
Next to me you are a lump under blankets.
Like a body buried in autumn leaves in the road against a curb.
I imagine you’d want to say the yard sounds like toucans.
You’d want to say toucans, from under your blanket.
But you make no noise.

Situations like these don’t just happen overnight, I want to say.
No, no they do not, is how you’d respond.

Michael Earl Craig 

is from Dayton, Ohio, home of the gas mask and the mood ring. He is the author of Iggy Horse
(Wave Books, 2023), Woods and Clouds Interchangeable (Wave Books, 2019), Talkativeness
(Wave Books, 2014), Thin Kimono (Wave Books, 2010), Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006),
Can You Relax in My House, (Fence Books, 2002), and the chapbook Jombang Jet
(Factory Hollow Press, 2012). He lives in Montana, where he makes his living as a farrier.
He was the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Montana.