Ete Perdu

Robert Halleck

An occasional Facebook friend messaged me to say you were dead. Time went back into itself. Into the past of strawberry kisses and Jean Nate scented sheets, your pale blue bedroom, and the sound of sparrows through slatted blinds on an early summer afternoon. We lay knowing we had left young safety and departed to an unknown place. I had said here is the time to live so why not now. Why not in a house empty of parental watch. Our nakedness burned your mirrors. All summer we searched and found other places for kisses, sex, and promises until your mother’s headache at afternoon bridge. We could not run fast enough to escape the storm.

Robert Halleck lives and works in Del Mar, CA. Two of his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared or will appear in The North Dakota Quarterly, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Up The River Journal and other interesting places.