Justin Runge

Justin Runge lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he serves as designer and poetry editor of Parcel. He is the author of Plainsight, available from New Michigan Press, and Hum Decode, forthcoming from Greying Ghost Press. His poetry has appeared in Linebreak, DIAGRAM, Harpur Palate and elsewhere.

Outline

I sneak in, partly to escape the strange room where I wake, but also for this—thin fifteen minutes of my father. It's night for me, but his morning. The shower is two doors away. Then he's a dark dressing shape. A belt buckle's clank. A cough, a yawn. Everything of our house that creaks. Then a drone down the street that I follow to its vanishing.

I'm in the theater as the sun sets. Night is an idea outside of us. We beckon black. We wait to enter. And when I hit my mark for the final scene, nearly bedtime, there he is, through the murk of auditorium, a shape again, the only audience member. It's how he reappears. I open my mouth. There's a song in there.