one-bedroom apartment

sometimes the mail is addressed to you

the foreign swoop and dive of the alphabet

someone just jumbled the envelopes and here you are again

lounging in the mailbox with the termites

their golden bodies sneaking across the black

and reading the postcards,

skimming the curves of a lost soul’s pen--

Greetings From Far Aways and

I’ll Be Seeing Yous

today the air is thin and cold

the old man on the porch across the way

sits with his knees too far apart

as he sucks the end of an old cigar

and the smell of spitty cardboard and wet matches

lands on my tongue, creeps up my throat until

it meets the smell of rain-tainted moss,

so today is a pumpkin-rotting October night

instead of a flowering May evening

a shiver runs beneath my skin,

skin peppered in sun’s laughter

but white in the slant of this wan light

and i walk to the mailbox, hoping to see your name

scrawled on a letter, probably from an insurance company

BETTER RATES, APPLY NOW

or some postal lie assuming your clothes still hang here

but instead it’s only my familiar alphabet

so i shuff through junk and return to senders

and wish for a whisper from you