My wife is a head injured person with skull fracture
from a fall off the double dip slide in Brownsville, Pa.
and I took header off the monkey bars in Bay City MI
myself but she is restless sleeper while I lay so still
there in corpse pose only rolling side to side so slowly
as she thrashes and sometimes stomps with her heel
staying close to middle of bed to fend off urgent abyss
all around on all sides so she feeds the blanket into my
hesitant shifts and when I make the bed in mornings
I mystery find the sheet top is 90 degrees to where it
                               started.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.