From Minneapolis in January
We live in the numbness
of an occupied city
where every story has another
story curled inside its labyrinth—
and when Sleep reads
to you at bedtime, it is
the nested one that comes
slinking out to sew you,
with tiny stitches and
scarlet thread, to the mattress.
It is a story that believes itself
to be permanent (an odd word,
because nothing is),
a story that is somehow
made of white light
bent and glaring to illuminate
what happened, then tell you
it did not happen. Dawn
slowly washes every face
sleeping in the pale grey
mop-water of its light.
Yet nobody awakens
and we cannot say why.
The answer is simple. Death
has come here on holiday
from the coast, yet its cousin
Sleep remains in charge.
Our nightmare is the waking.
Found In Volume 55, No. 02
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