We keep waiting to wake up & know what we’re doing;

         we’ve learned to be grateful

               for any colored shard of glass

not shaped like a bullet.

                                  We are driving in a blizzard (not a metaphor,

        we could die, I have a lot of responsibility

               here) & our daughter

is telling us a ghost story, we’re listening

                             for any clues to the riddle

            that is her mind at 15—her life

has ceased to revolve

           around us. There are so many

                                                 bullets, we’ve learned

       not to take these small moments for granted.

                                       In this story, the father

           of the children of her Sims character

                                    came to visit, refused to leave.

     She built a tiny room, lured him in, deleted the door.

Thirty game-days later, he died.

        The story takes a long time to tell,

                          our son keeps interrupting

                                        to sing “We Got the Beat”

                                                      & talk about his plans

          for his new airsoft gun with the biodegradable ammo.

Everything is so dangerous (there

          are no metaphors), it’s our fault

                                               for giving him what he wanted,

this world, its shattered edges. He has 2,000 pellets,

                        a freshly charged battery,

             a friend to shoot at. What more

                       could a boy want? She likes

                                 having the ghost around,

             she says, better now than when he was alive,

& this sounds like a mostly okay ending,

             probably all we can ask.