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