by Robert Vaughan
for Matthew Wayne Shepard (12/1/76- 10/12/98)
When the wind whistles
through any barbed-wire
fence you can hear him
sing your name, you
who left him hanging
there like a scare-
crow, through a
black, never-ending night
and a Laramie
prairie chill, a torture that
even the killdeer’s scree
could not see coming…
kidnapped, robbed, pistol-
whipped, then eighteen
hours in crystallizing temps
tethered to a fence
his coma was so quiet,
one of the killers would
later say, you could almost
hear ice rattling down the canyon