Matthew Yeager’s poems have appeared most recently in Sixth Finch, Bat City Review, Agriculture Reader, and NY Quarterly. His short film “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment,” based on his long poem of the same title (Best American Poetry 2005), screened to acclaim on the festival circuit in 2009. He lives in Brooklyn, NY Property of Alvin Flover Matthew Yeager I poked my stick into a crumpled coffee cup and before I put it into my trash bag I noticed that written on it, in black sharpie, were the words PROPERTY OF ALVIN FLOVER. I didn’t give it much thought. People write their names on coffee cups fairly often, or push dents in them to designate what’s theirs. About a week later though, in a different neighborhood, I poked my stick into an empty package of batteries upon which PROPERTY OF ALVIN FLOVER had also been written. Hmm, I thought. The occurrences continued. On Jones Beach, there was a Styrofoam Big Mac container with PROPERTY OF ALVIN FLOVER. Also that day I found his mark on the shell of a crab, the inside of a Snickers wrapper, and a piece of blanched driftwood. My community service had me all over the place and I had nothing better to do, so I decided I might as well help him. I started scribbling PROPERTY OF ALVIN FLOVER—first on certain interesting pieces of refuse, then on just about everything. It was actually a godsend. I won’t even get into why… Anyway, adding to the evidence of Mr. Alvin Flover’s stay on earth became my new game. I tagged old LP covers in piles of street trash, cigarette packs, blue iron mailboxes. I moved my Sharpie from my pants pocket to my breast pocket. When no one was looking, I even leaned over my dead uncle’s coffin, unbuttoned his shirt, and FLOVERed right on his chest. (It was sick, but I used to think that Flover would be especially proud of this one.) Of course I liked to think that others were out there as well, spreading his cause, but there was no way to know. Perhaps it was just a two-man operation: Flover and myself. Perhaps he and I alone were a “we.” Up late and alone—and it’s six years later—I still find myself thinking of him. In my fantasy he is on a walk deep in the woods. He comes across a faded beer can, doubled over. Removing his Sharpie, reaching down to that small piece of the universe, he discovers with great surprise that it already belongs to him.