The voices in the radio. They seeped
out from the Zenith’s woven thatch. They weren’t
the voice my sister heard. She’d fall asleep
before Lone Ranger. In altered dark I learned
to listen to the Three Invisibles:
Old Peg, Sam Crow, a wrangler named John Naught.
They fought for places on the windowsills,
not whispering, not worried they’d be caught.
Something or nothing, they had their sovereignty.
My sister slept beside a cotton hound
tattooed in autographs, her company,
but if he howled it was a private sound.
My Three told lies and swaggered visibly.
They lived inside the radio, not in me.
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Erica Funkhouser is the author of five books of poems, most recently Earthly (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). She teaches the Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in Essex, Massachusetts. (updated 10/2014)