I’ve already pieced it out in my head:
there’s almost nothing to go back to.
The wide flat palm of the prickly pear
outside Bent Prop Liquors. I kid you
not that the air’s so red, day’s end,
that it unlooses a fat ribbon of regret.
Yet the air does not move; it hangs
its squalid rags on the post; it poops
dirty bats out of the public
library’s colonnade. I wasn’t the first
kid you raped. In this indifferent orchard
where many a shallow boy got dumped.
I think of you often. I think of you never
so much I dare to touch my stolen twig.