The man making the phone call from the hotel room hasn’t been right for weeks. Back in the town he grew up in, spirit dried like cracked river-bed, empty mini-bottles of spirits lie sidewards beside the bed.

The room has a Bible and a phone book. Picks up one volume and calls home, gets Judges, 
picks up the other book because he’s looking for mercy not repentance. 

He wants the girl he loved in high school. Looking for her name he remembers something 
about a move Midwest, calls her brother Dan instead, supplicating seven-fingered plus an area code. 

A static click of reception and he sobers for a moment, remembering the time, remembering 
the suburban equivalence of darkness to silence. Dan is saying hello? Hello? 

And the man alone in the hotel room doesn’t know about the nephew of his old girl sleeping new 
and pink upstairs, Dan’s neck swaddling the landline, pen to hand trying to get down a number, 

the man doesn’t know when he speaks his own name he’ll remember how the girl he loved 
for just a few months far too young would sigh his name again, again so he knew it didn’t hurt, 

doesn’t know about the baby he left in her, doesn’t know the brother’s sister’s daughter will write about him, imagining down all the wrong channels. 

(now Peter wears Bermuda shorts) 
(now he flies business class to Milan each year) 
(now his drinking’s turned to Oxy) 
(now his drinking’s turned to yoga) 
(now he has a husband and three kids) 
(now he has a daughter, just a daughter) 

She won’t know about his coma till he slips past it, this phantom father 
to a never-brother, a never-sister, dead then as their never-father will be, though 

she won’t find his obituary, and of course won’t memorialize 
her lost little-big brother-sister who never had a name.