Sleet drives down the dark street.
A homeless man puts a shawl
Across his wife’s shoulders
And she sleeps
Or tries to sleep
Propped
Against a stucco wall
Behind an empty store.
It’s getting cold
This time of year.
Hunger this evening
Pelts her dreams
Like buckshot.
And the night
Crawls along
The alley
Like a cold snake.
And the moon appears to rise
From the mountains
Like a slow mirage.
John Garmon is a writing assistant at the College of Southern Nevada. He has been writing and submitting for 60 years, and his poems have been in Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Paintbrush, The Texas Slough, New Mexico Humanities Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Radius, West, and many other magazines.