Flashlight Tag

by Kyle Booten

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.