Sleeper (Meghan)

Sleeper

On Christmas day, I fell asleep

on the rug I can’t remember.

It was pneumonia, I was small, and

no one knew how to play the piano yet,

to wake me with carols

I’d suffer to sing.

In our shared bed, she begged for stories.

Schools of fish in multicolor  mixing across

human prejudice.  Reenactments of

movie musicals boiled and

thickened into memory.

Moving cars were cradles:

An engine’s hum beneath my short legs,

head unhinged bouncing between

cold glass and the near-noose of seatbelt nylon.

At the exit, I stirred but pretended sleep,

hoping Dad might carry me inside.

It was tenderness, not ease.

I wonder why I never simply asked.

The floors were hardwood, so

I did crunches on the soft bed,

listened to the old slats fall

and gazed at the ceiling fan.

We didn’t call them boom boxes anymore,

but it was busy drowning out

the story in my head, the one about

a teenager named Natalie who wanted to be

beautiful and smart at the same time.

Her room was ten steps away, but

there were nights when we’d rather not sleep

alone.  She couldn’t tell me who I was.

The stranger she’d kissed on the dance floor

couldn’t give her health insurance.

My long body and hers compact running on,

two un-indented paragraphs sidling close

hunching toward meaning.

We slammed the futon into the center of the studio,

collapsed in Indian Summer.

I wished the windows had screens.

He was drunk when he told me he loved me.

I got high on believing him,

on the way my hair looked wild in the morning

after turning over, a rabbit on a spit,

in the suffocating heat of my city cell, under

the weight of Grendel’s arm across my waist.

He admired the blue-gray of my bedroom,

imagined the tension in my arms as they pressed

pigment into what must have been Builders’ beige,

completing the work alone because it hurts to think

another slept where he sometimes sleeps.

When the parasites invaded,

I slept with the lights and all my clothes on.

Insects aren’t that smart, but the ears, eyes, and nose

are pathways to the brain.

When they were dead, I asked

the God I don’t believe in

How long before I rest?

You slept; I didn’t.

So I noticed when your leg seized mine at 2am

and wondered what magazines would say

about the way couples sleep.

Pirate leg means possession?

We’d laugh and call it luck.

In the semi-conscious space of the snooze button,

you reached for my body, which introduced my brain,

and we rested there for nine minutes.

I think that we are more than bodies and brains,

but not just now.