is another way to ask you let me tell you
how to love me, to say why at night I curl

into the shape of a question mark: the summer Bobbie Womack
sang from the kitchen radio, the summer Gary

drowned in the quarry, and how I cut class
and walked everywhere that year, how I read Beckett

in the park I was seventeen I was a boy
whose chest was like a black balloon

someone was letting the air out of slowly.

Sometimes I think I hear stories rise from the felt
of all the wins and losses that occurred on the tables
over the years. Sometimes they rise into the air
and you think you hit a shot good, but it hits a word
and veers off. You don't know WHY the shot missed,
but it was that word from a decade ago, that was hidden
in the cloth. A word said the night back a decade ago
when someone lost their rent money
over an unmade nine ball, and stood
out in the parking lot after not knowing
where to go or what to do or what to tell
his woman. Not wanting to drive home.
Under a moonless sky. Blue chalk
like dried blood staining his palms.