Run the Red Lights. Ed Skoog

      along with the day’s receipts.

      Nothing’s lost. I carry my own

      props in—red telephone,

      bowl of apples—and then with me draw

      back into the unseen.

The Children’s Theater

      One morning I’ll leave the house naked

      and stroll down the street, fun for everyone

      to be relieved from shame for a moment,

      nourishment for my inner scold.

      Most people I’ve seen, I’ve seen clothed.

      What anyone wore I don’t remember,

      while the people I’ve seen nude

      I remember everything about, or can I

      draw the first nipple I kissed by video light

      or the cyclorama of middle-school showers

      all of us in awful proportions, half-kid, half-dude.

      Classmates with the largest dicks

      have been first to die, by misadventure,

      cancer, problems of the liver. Still,

      most Swedes debut sexually at fifteen

      and in China it’s twenty-three.

      Everyone in this floating world is naked.

      I’m tired of having a body. The mind’s a bore

      too, with its video light. On their patio,

      my neighbors talk about their bodies

      in low voices while the bug zapper

      administers its anonymous questionnaire.

      Last week I went for an HIV test

      at the free clinic below the repair shop

      for musical instruments, also

      housing a children’s theater,

      and I could hear them improvising

      as I waited twenty minutes for my blood

      to signal the presence or absence

      of antibodies. The woman who

      administered my test and an anonymous

      questionnaire did not believe my story

      though it was both rehearsed and true:

      the gas station in Nevada, the basin

      where I washed up after hours dazed

      on the road bloody with a stranger’s

      inner life covering my hands,

      my face before I noticed. I remember

      going to the traveling show of Sweeney Todd

      in which my cousin Stuart, trained for opera,

      submitted his throat to the “demon barber’s”

      stage knife, sending his body down

      the ingenious chute, where Angela Lansbury

      baked him into pie. His only sung Sondheim

      was “a lavabo and a fancy chair.” Lavabo,

      from the Psalms: I will wash my hands

       in innocency: so will I compass thine altar.

      But it just means a sink to wash the blood.

      Whose blood? You don’t get more naked

      than blood. At the clinic, mine dotted

      a simple device to rehearse its speech.

      I answered her questions of history, sexual

      partnerships, gender, gender preference.

      Whether rough or high, or had traveled

      to any of the following countries.

      Behind the wall’s frank posters and the plush

      toy vulvas piled in the corner, some children’s

      play dreamed itself into being. We know

      without being told that theaters are haunted.

      They share with graveyards the whistling taboo,

      the seatbacks curved like tombstone tops.

      It’s the stage manager’s job to make sure

      a light is left on in that cavern when the last

      actor’s gone home, stagehands to the bar:

      the spirit light, one bulb to keep company.

      Of course, my blood maintained its old narrative

      and I left with my burden lifted, or shifted.

      Behind the wall, child actors assembled comedy.

      Because my cousin had done it, and family

      spoke proudly of him, I wanted to be an actor

      and made the customary adolescent gestures

      toward it. Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou

      signed his portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt

      the way we signed one another’s playbills

      after the run of a high-school play, some inside

      jokes that even we forgot the story of, that mask

      the love between people who wear masks.

      Not much was said of him after that, alas.

      Plays scare, endear me, even a children’s summer

      production, or wherever in suspended belief

      a figure steps forward, outstretches

      costumed hand and pronounces my name.

Grateful Dead Tapes

      Even though we’ve already been dead,

      when I find two trays of Grateful Dead tapes

      in a Missoula secondhand store,

      I too feel bound in the stasis of cassette,

      plastic cases scarred and cracked

      like old scuba goggles. Some retain

      the delicate peg that lets the door swing open;

      some have broken, maybe from a fall

      when someone slid too fast the van door open

      in a hot parking lot. Could be no tragedy

      made the tapes secondhand greater

      than a lost interest. Used to listen to them,

      the owner might say, the way you adjust

      to walking past a grave. I love him, or her,

      who curated these happenings, although

      the Dead’s not really my bag. I follow

      other melodies and injured visions, draw

      my cider from another press, a cooler lava.

      I saw them once, summer of ’95 at RFK,

      with my friend Jax. It was terrible,

      a lot of twentieth-century business came due

      at once. Bob Dylan opened unintelligible

      and sleepy as if reaching from the frost

      to make known “in