by Mike Wilson

I was born a foster child.

I was seven feet tall at an early age.

They made me eat by myself, but the food was okay.

I married my mother in middle school.

We almost got jumped downtown

when I parked near Dollar General

to purchase a trifle she wanted

and my windshield popped out.

Some thugs pretended to be an auto body shop

and got mad when we wouldn’t roll down our windows.

That’s the last time I saw Mom.

Unlike most kids, who grow up, I shrank

and became an attorney.

I practiced law in a field of corn

perpetually ready for harvest.

There was a bank in the center of the acreage,

square, like the Kaaba, but smaller, shady inside.

It smelled of cigars, money, and black mold.

I had a lockbox there.

My last case was an uncontested divorce.

I wrote the parties to meet in the corn to sign papers.

I represented the wife, but she never showed.

The man who signed wasn’t even her husband

but it seemed like a good deal and he wanted in on it.

He also wanted to hide gold coins in my lockbox.

He paid me to wait while he went in his truck to fetch them,

His black F-150 disappeared in a cloud of dust.

I wake and think how I’ll always be that young attorney,

that foster kid who eats off a plate by himself.

Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in many magazines and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic. His awards include the League of Minnesota Poets Award, the Maine Poets Society Award, and the Chaffin/Kash Prize of the Kentucky State Poetry Society. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.