How did I win this privilege
you all bent on my chest?
As windows watch us breathless,
your text might know the rest.

The secrets lie within
your sheets, but all can see:
books have the only spines
that’d ever sleep with me.

————

A poet who also had to get a paying job, J.M. McBirnie has tricked such publications as Whistling Shade and Dappled Things to accept their work, and their self-published (gasp!) poetry collections include The Dead of April and Let Us Go.