HERE IS THE PLACE that is most comfortable.
Right here in front of the television. I fear

I raised her wrong. There she is on TV. What a pill
she can be. What a beauty. You know

I used to be thin like that. She has a pair
of my Bobbi Brooks trousers from before

she was born. She thinks she’s the height
of fashion. I guess she is.

On My route, the man who lives out east
on Pantano says he watches her show

religiously. That’s my girl, I say. Isn’t she
a pill? He laughs and takes his mail at the box.

I e-mailed her today and she wrote me right back.
I don’t see myself in her at all. But at times I see

her father. What love we had. She doesn’t remember
those parts, just when it got bad, when he had to leave,

when I was not a mother.
I was a sleeper.

Not the kind you’re thinking,
but the Wooo Woooo kind.

With a cigarette’s orange tip
between my fingers, I think about when I was a kid.

Waiting it out as we sat at the crossing,
the hot night and my father smoking a joint.

Who is on that train? Does it need anyone

to drive it really? The upholstery carving
a deep tapestry into my thighs. The differences
between right and wrong. The differences.

The landscaping is neatness, the trees are
not strategic. There is shade on the table.

I have been here for two hours, the sign
took five minutes. The dogs are sleeping

at the stone base of the table. The cold water
in the washroom is hotter than the hot. I don’t

have toothpaste. On the sign I wrote the word
PLEASE twice. Signs always help.

The girl who sits in her air conditioned car
was falling asleep on the highway but now

she is awake. She reads the sign. She tries to close
her eyes. She hits the horn accidentally.

The sign is not for her it is for me and the dogs.
It helps, the sign does.

the street sweeper? In the early hours of the morning
it does a job on all that piss. Do you want some

cheese? Some whiskey? I am not hungry but I’ll
drink any time. Christophe is not home, his work

takes him many places. He is so young.
Thinking about him makes me panic.

I am not his only one. He is not mine either
but only because I am not his. Out that window

is the church of St. Paul. People without homes
sleep there from time to time. No harm done.

In the earliest hours I lie awake. Voices echo
up from the street. And the sweeper comes.

I think about its large greenness and its brushes.
It lulls me in the half-dark.