The View from Behind

The line doesn't move.

I’ve read the poster about mail fraud

four times.

The man in front of me has a neck

the color of a peeled root vegetable.

His barber went too high,

leaving the skin raw and shivering

under the vent of the air conditioner.

Right where his spine disappears

into the base of his skull,

there’s a mole, dark and lone,

like a period at the end of a sentence

he doesn't even know he’s writing.