Finding Home by Tina Hacker

On the way back from the bathroom
Don gets lost,
his one bedroom apartment
his desert, no landmarks in sight.
Two in the morning, lights off,
he sits in the kitchen,
waiting
for his wife to miss his warmth in bed.
Sometimes her dreams overcome
the 911 from her body and she sleeps on.
Then he calls out her name
gulping breaths of air like code
between the syllables.
He isn’t old, isn’t senile;
it’s just something
he does since he came back
from Iraq.
He set crisp boundaries around his life
like creases on a uniform,
and when sleep wrinkles them,
it’s no longer safe to go forward.

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