There’s a Sicilian man lying face down
on cement in Omaha. Five feet away is a gun
still warm and shining on sickly pavement.
The blood makes its way to the pile
of newspapers that landed there
at four o’clock in the morning and tints
the grainy paper still shivering from a hot press.
A black veiled Sicilian woman sits
in pieces on the floor with a phone
in her lap and turns her stomach in knots.
If the dead man could think at all
he would know that somewhere
there is a woman who loves him.
If she could hear that well she’d see
that he never called enough.
She chokes through the phone call
over blood thick and sour coffee
and imagines a lover out cold
and caked in a single breasted pin striped suit.