Michael Palmer / A Mistake


       

I mistakenly killed a man some years ago. I do not mean that I killed him by mistake,
since I killed him intentionally. I mean that it was a mistake to kill him. I slit his throat
with a serrated hunting knife I then always carried. It was in front of a Chinese laundry
on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I thought he had called me “little dago boy,” though
in fact, as others later attested, he had called out, “Hey, little day-glo boy,” in playful
reference to the bright color of my shirt.



CUE:  A Journal of Prose Poetry
Winter, 2006  Vol. 3, Issue 1