Let’s be still, scream if it helps, join the rain

pounding these streets. It’s all wrong:

we can’t sleep, can’t wake, making

love is a seizure and the sheets bind us.

But here now is darkness, here now

night falls and makes us quiet.

After a time, we lose track, the head nods,

we acquiesce. We knew what was

coming: now, then now, then too late.

When I was young, I waited for

you in an abandoned building

in the French Quarter. I remember

it was crumbled in plaster and stitched

with sinuous vines. That night the trees

were suspended from the moon; they

hung like seedbursts that had dropped

from the sky. I waited late for you

and heard homeless boys sing

their made up street songs, and saw

an old man, unstrung, dancing

streetlight to streetlight, at night,

under a black umbrella. You never came,

but I was grateful you let me think

you would be there, inside the stuccoed walls,

on the humid cement, and how it made me want

to be where I was. I waited for you and time

dissipated like blood in the ocean.

Mike Forecki lived and practiced law in Eau Claire for more than 30 years. He now divides his time between the St Croix River on the Western edge of Wisconsin and Florida’s Southern Gulf Coast. For more by and about Mike, see his author page at VolumeOne.org.