into a horizontal position that matches my own
on an itchy couch while my family
is asleep each in their own rented room
wiped from the day’s travel and nerves on this second
night of winter vacation
and i am playing a new zombie apocalypse
shooting game against the dark and exhaustion
the undead get increasingly less dead
and the weapons keep getting upgraded
for every win i die
four or five times and how
i need the escape
from my nightly ritual
of the two wars in the newsfeed
how i love that i have no face
in the game
that i am completely and utterly alone
and forget the nerves, the toll
life’s taking on all four of us this year
i forget the summons
my parents in ukraine received last month
for me to join the town’s regimen
our ukrainian bureaucracy was always
the unhappy genius that speaks
in god’s shortcuts
there’s a version of life where i did not get a fellowship
and left ukraine as a teen
i am still there now
with them all preparing
myself for the inevitable and obvious
there’s a half-dozen lives
where these nightly newsfeeds
are awake and entwine
like a mating snake ball
and i am just one
writhing muscle inside of it
which reality is the one
i am least alone in
or most free in
and couldn’t it be this one dim
tunnel where i just have to bang
the explosives barrel that will shred
so i can walk on
