Mike Wilson

Faces on Milk Cartons

She speaks as if something crawled inside
her skin, settled into the driver’s seat, and
drove away
                      while the true owner wanders
lost in musty hallways, trailing her fingers
along the wall, someone who in the middle
of an errand to fetch an object forgets why
she got up
                    Or maybe it’s me stepping
outside the frame of my picture, leaving
empty a painted canvas hanging above
a brass label that reads “Hi, I’m ____”
            in
a gallery persistently empty, no matter how
many bodies sleepwalk in their graves
                                                                  a
hall of animated headaches vandalized with
laughter and penknives
                                       a nude landscape of
nuclear shadows, Hiroshima with a cash bar

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including Amsterdam Quarterly, Mud Season Review, The London Reader, The Ocotillo Review and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press, 2020), political poetry for a post-truth world. Mike is a past winner of Kentucky State Poetry Society’s Chaffin/Kash Prize. He resides in Lexington, Kentucky, and can be found at mikewilsonwriter.com