::: SKIDROW PENTHOUSE :::

Through the valley the dashboard hums, sleep
a fidget of father’s thumb. The boy is blasting
his GI figurines with a juice box straw. They are far
from the hearsay of dormered windows. Widening Nevada night
at once a tunnel and a prayer—the Chrysler burrows,
raises a flag to the ugly idol of leaving. Boy dreams of Osiris,
carries the god on shoulders hunched with the weight
of never-ending, like one old shoe mistaken
for a way through. Now he stirs, asks Oh daddy,
why don’t we have a king? But the man behind the wheel

had gone on ahead, to the tombs of Vegas parlors and neon fields,
where children mount up like hawks, collide.
Father followed the ringing in his ears, took the room key,
laid the child down. Then: into the mired night, to melt into riches,
glean flesh from stone. In the arid dawn the boy unfurls,
throat clotted with the knotted words that infants wail
once they know they cannot turn back. He does not rise—
never stops running from the cold morning bed toward the crown.
There were no mansions hung from trees—only trees.

Emily Borgmann