You are reading Fiddleblack #7
X-ray walking around with my name,
your ID and address, please.
Where are you going tonight and why
the wide eyes? Don’t mumble, don’t
give me your doppelganger smirk.
What are you doing in my charcoal suit?
Sales? Home invasions? Past nights
in plainclothes I’ve watched you
try every door on the block, buzz
stranger’s apartments at three a.m.,
check unlocked cars for keys.
What the hell? Let’s get you home,
menace, cuff you to the bedframe
for everybody’s good.
Michael Walsh is the author of The Dirt Riddles, winner of the Miller Williams Prize in Poetry, as well as the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His chapbooks include Adam Walking the Garden and Sleepwalks. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, DIAGRAM, New York Quarterly and other journals.