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Nick, Patrick, and the Nightmares in Building 57

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle

What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?

Another mother shrieks, next table over, of her son, inmate Nick,
who doesn’t understand.
Why not watch crazies kill,
whether horror movies or here?
It’s Halloween, after all,
so he pivots, dives up and rips the phone off the wall.
Inmate Patrick shrugs, but the voices escape the wired hole,
syllables crawling down the Dali wall.
Whether Poe, Stoker, Brockden Brown,
the chattered allusions march out,
nightmare notebooks, scribbled quotations
fill the state-issued bureau drawers.
His eyes narrow in quiz:

What’s my line, now?

From his last research paper for history:
Hitler still has the Russian summer beckoning,
and those poets are not yet frozen dead on the Eastern Front...
But no time for candy bars and Cokes today,
no visits to the machine, no touch.
Buzzed back into reality
locked down in bigger Romper Rooms,
we’re all just Bozos,
Krugers, Lecters.

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