Ghost Town

                   East Hartford, Connecticut
                   December, 1967

_____When I got home from Fort Dix, East Hartford was a ghost-town. Everyone was either working, at school, in Nam, or dead, so I’d spend long, bleak, suicidal afternoons in the woods naked, one hand on my dick, one on my old man’s shotgun, practicing being born, learning to die.

John L. Stanizzi’s full-length collections are Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallalujah Time!, and High Tide-Ebb Tide. His work is widely published and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, The Cortland Review, Paterson Literary, Tar River Poetry, and many others. Chants, his latest book, will be out this summer.