Three Sleepless Nights

1.

For our anniversary, I climb the burial mound in the field and build a small fire with last year’s wood to warm my body through another sleepless night. Like teepees, wheat sheaves stand where corn lulled once under summer’s deep water. Slowly, the green eyes of silos blink on as the sun arches across the western sky.

2.

The moon climbs out of the field where arrowheads work to the surface sure as memories triggered by smell, where the heat of my body and yours was enough to unlock the earth, where the wind now swirls the ghosts of forgone lovers above me like clouds shimmering over the moon.

3.

Tonight, frost halos my body and a long fuse of stars sizzles past moments that will always bind me to you: the doe we hit before we married that tried to run with broken legs; the night I found you blue beside me in bed and breathed you back from asthma; the child we have and the child growing inside you. The door that I’ve built with my heat stands open.


Kip Knott | Mudlark No. 26
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