They look at you through bathroom windows
to see how you use mirrors to fashion yourself
to their liking.  There, in the yard, they sing

Christmas carols—praises moving only upward.  The sky bruises
from the impact.  You realize that the crowd is not
a crowd, but a record

playing on repeat.  Laser lights look like green flies
atop the snow waiting for your exit and, despite the
Nativity scenes
fronting all the houses on your street,

you still worry.

Why is the only way out, back
the way you came?
You say these things to yourself
in the most mundane of tasks like when you shoveled
snow the day before and couldn’t go screaming across
the street.  You looked up at your

house, afraid to start the cycle
of undressing and showering,
coming out,
reading a book,

because you know there is a strange
remembering in repeat.  When your cousin
read the eulogy for your grandpa,

you sat like you did in school.  Three days later, you
could have sworn you heard the eulogy in
the math problems.  That isn’t strange Father Nick told you
everything is calculated.  You were ready
to hear it right then and there.  You wonder
if his answer would have shifted
if you said you were no longer afraid of coincidence—

So, you stand
in the bathroom looking down at the dotted lights that
your mind turned into flies.  
You listen for the music
to skip a beat and decode a temporary religion.  You pray
that, beneath the still sheet of the dark,
something moves.

Mark Bias was born in Daegu, South Korea and lived in an orphanage there. He was adopted and sent to the United States at an early age. He received an MA in English at The College of New Jersey. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Likely Red Press, Silver Needle Press, and elsewhere. He currently lives and teaches in New York.