My black shirt inside out I trip in the wet ditch but keep going past the tree Jenny and Matt humped for money past the trampoline where we dared them and I hide in a bush and am quiet but I hear your breath and see your lantern I cower in the drainage pipe beneath the street but you know this place so I make for the school dumpsters but you are always there rotting I stow myself be- low deck on Charon’s zombie barge and you are the coin and the transcendent dead I fly back to my warm house (which is really cheating b/c houses are off- limits) reach into the refrigerator and how much sweeter milk tastes when I am a fugitive but of course you are what makes it sweet Everybody has gone home With my night vision I see only you I wish you’d yield but it’s not in your nature now is it You look frozen but are faster than I am Moon of my Hour who must chase me though never in your real form

KYLE BOOTEN’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Guernica, and Ghoti. He won a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is in the MFA program. He is from Nashville.