AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This poem is dedicated to anyone who has ever shared a wall with another couple. In college, this means listening to the moans of other students having sex, as you lay alone on the top of a bunk bed in the next room. If you live in a college town, like my wife and I do, this means trying to sleep through the undergraduates next door who love to play Dance Dance Revolution at 2:30 on Tuesday nights. Whatever the situation, at first, you joke about the couple that is always fighting or the man who sings off-key in the shower. Eventually, though, the realization sets in: if we can hear them, they can hear us. And next: if they can hear us, what must they be thinking?

BIO:

Casey Thayer holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University and has poems forthcoming in The Journal, Poetry, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Rock County.