Back to Issue 4

Making Dust Angels in the Middle of an Unkempt Floor by David M Pitchford

Hours? Years? Decades?
He keeps his angels in the unkempt dust
down on Delaware where the old stump
still surrenders booty Bobby collected
playing pirate games at five...

At six Bobby bit a bullet
got a bullet in the head, now I'm gone and dead
put a bullet in my head, and now I'm gone and dead
Can't see me cause I'm dead - I put a bullet in my head
in the bathtub - not to leave
a mess for his beaten siblings
to clean up...

Knowing less of death
than the condition he knew
as life, Bobby skips silence
across deserted floors
kicks up dust devils to battle his angels,
haunting the place he never lived
but ended life with a .32 Bearcat

Little ghostboy Bobby hasn't a clue
about the nearby college expanding,
land and house assumed as immanent domain
and plans for a daycare there where he lingers

Bobby plays with broken glass,
wonders that he never bleeds -
can't reach out to the breathers
but that's okay - no one ever listened
when he was one of them, a breather
breath ragged with asthma and reflux
waiting for the next swing of a belt, board, or...

a backhoe breaks apart
condemned walls of the only prison
Bobby knows as home.

Who knows why those shapes grace
frosted panes on winter days
in the Delaware Street Daycare...

Bio:   David Pitchford has had poetry published in The Alchemist Review , Writers Block , and Prism Quarterly.