a dream of twilight’s creep
distended into the morning
fog of which fucking day?

in yours I leave you
for a Twitch streamer

in mine I lose you
in a theater panic
when a woman–it was unclear–
was suddenly laid on a table
and the crowd ran screaming

I dropped our keys
while a naked man explained
his nakedness casually

I wake up and wake you up
and cry hard

this happens every few months

my friends are being burned alive
in some subterranean oven
and I climb in to join them
in an act of sacrifice but the heat
terrifies me and I scream my apologies

my mother’s home is raided
by gun-toting horsemen
and I am shot to death
in my attempts to drive them off

the impossibility of protection
the obvious theme

meanwhile
a friend sends me a Ziploc
bag of soccer ball superballs
short on postage

and a friend shares an EP
he recorded fifteen years ago

and that streamer is pretty cute after all

…

Michael Flatt is the author of Absent Receiver (SpringGun Press, 2013) and the co-author, with Derrick Mund, of Chlorosis (The Operating System, 2018). He is the editor of Low Frequency Press, which publishes book-like objects of marginal aesthetics, and Threadsuns, a teaching press at High Point University, where he is an assistant professor of English.