Because so long as I play this video game,
time has no meaning and I cannot die.
Because I’ve been spending a lot of time
not picking up my underwear.
Because the telephone is full of voices,
bursting with other people’s judgments.
Because when I open the door of my house,
nobody rushes in.
Barbara J. Orton’s poems appear in anthologies including Villanelles, Sestinas, Under the Rock Umbrella, and The New Young American Poets, and in journals including Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and the Innisfree Poetry Journal. She works as a freelance editor and as a writing tutor for MCPS University.
