By Laura Paul Watson

Featured Art: Glittering the Being by Roberto Matta

May he wake to an empty house.
May every pleasure
be interrupted. May every wheel squeak.
When he reaches the front of the line
may he return to the end of it
and may everyone before him
pay by personal check.
May he receive a thousand e-mails a day,
none of them personal, every one of them personal. 
May he go nowhere in metaphor
but travel everywhere by bus.
May every road be under construction.
May he lose the last page of every book.
May he find no pillow in the field.
May he find no field.
When faced with stone, may he see only stone.
Because he is narrow, may he hold
no one but himself.
There is power in forgiveness.
There is power in withholding it.
May he have the life he wished for me.
May every way be the dark way home.

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Laura Paul Watson lives and writes in Pine, Colorado. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. When not writing poetry, she works as a general contractor remodeling and building new homes with her husband in the Denver area. Her work has also appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Poetry Northwest, among others.