Tag: insomnia

INSOMNIA by Mary Donnelly

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INSOMNIA

As a child, I was
not strong enough
to be kind.
Fear made me
cruel. Made me lazy.

And so I said
things—not often,
though frequent
enough—that now
keep me up at night

as I slowly age
on a long blue couch.
Things I can’t
take back. Un-
breakable things.

*

Mary Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based educator and video producer whose poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hanging Loose, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, and The Yale Review, and in the chapbook Mad World Colored Oil (Dancing Girl Press). She teaches through Gotham Writers Workshop and is a senior editor for DMQ Review.

In One of Night’s Anonymous Hours by Mary Makofske

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In One of Night’s Anonymous Hours

I lie awake hearing the wind,
a freight loaded up with the past.
No brakeman, no brakes, and the tracks
leading straight to my bed.

*

Mary Makofske is the author of six books of poetry. Her latest are No Angels (Kelsay, 2023, nominated for the Eric Hoffer Award); The Gambler’s Daughter (Orchard Street Press, 2022); World Enough, and Time (Kelsay, 2017); and Traction (Ashland Poetry, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. She received the 2024 William Matthews Prize from Asheville Poetry Review and has received first place prizes in Quiet Diamonds, Atlanta Review, New Millennium Writings, Lullwater Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Ledge, and Cumberland Poetry Review, and the Hudson-Fowler Prize for a five poem submission from Slant. marymakofske.com

Insomnia by Sydney Lea

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Insomnia

When I can’t sleep, I forge rough rhymes,
matching blindness, say, with timeless,
or almost matching popular
with poplar. Yes, it’s idleness,

and I concede I stretch the rules
as when I pair up misery
and pity– all a trick to find
a way to lie there worry-free.

No, don’t call it trick but mission
even passion, this urge to prise
away each fear, however small,
that blights me. But hard as I try,

my words do as they please. They scorn
resistance: I’ve just sought to link
bliss to something beside distress
but despite me the effort brings

not half-rhymed release but bereft.

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Two Poems by Dick Westheimer

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Ghazal For a Fallen Nation

It’s tough when it’s all just conspiracy shit
that they’ve beamed down from the mothership.*

In America friendships are split when friends
raise the flag on the wrong color ship.

The neighbor boy whose suicide we lament
idolized his granddad’s warriorship.

My bluegrass buddy wound up on a vent,
he mistook reading Facebook threads for scholarship.

It is forbidden to speak of politics when in bed
rocking the waves of my lover’s hips.

My dad sang God Bless America at every event.
Like Irving Berlin he treasured his citizenship.

* Quote from the August 1, 2023 filing indicting former President Trump

* 

Another Fucking Poem About Insomnia

I pass the night picking digits off the clock
in ones and twos, counting cricket chirps on my fingers,
trying to remember a line from a poem I’d yet to write,

not remembering if I took out the trash. By 3 AM,
the covers strewn and sheets tangled at my knees,
my head hurts from thoughts like squirrels scritching

at each other, bounding off walls, like a thousand pingpong
balls. At four I stick the numbers back on the clock—the five
and then the six—and when the alarm goes off at seven, I am

grateful I don’t remember falling asleep. Outside my office
window the drone of bees in the hibiscus flowers drowses me,
makes me think I could nap. I can’t nap.

I don’t know how to let things happen without me—
what if I miss a breaking news headline or the flash
of that line of poetry I’ve waited for? And here it is midnight,

again, and I am afraid—to go up to bed, knowing I will be obsessed
picking those red-hot digits from the clock again. And as the bee
sleeps in the hive and the hibiscus petals

are wrapped tight for the night, I am kept awake,
listening for that drone of sleep that never comes.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Journal, Gyroscope Review, Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritual Well, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Insomnia in Winter by Jessica Purdy

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Insomnia in Winter

Puddles merge to form a lake in the driveway.
Plump drops almost snowlike hit the window.
The house is falling into the earth. A sinkhole
eats the garage. It’s getting closer to the kitchen
as I speak. The sump pump drones on mindless
in the basement. My sleep ruined, I’m awake
at 3 am again. It’s not my friend, this un-time.
Undermining and obsessive, my thoughts are brain
worms squirreling into the crevices.
Clothes and bed damp. I don’t want
any fundamental things. No hierarchy of needs here.
My wants are outside myself, but they live inside me.
They burrow down. Earthworms disappeared
back in September. Leaves were disappeared
in November and the blowers have come
and done away with their garbage. What haven’t I done?
Well, I haven’t needed to pee in a while.
I drank water 5 hours ago. The backs
of my knees are slick with sweat. Everything
is damp in December. Who’s got their lights on already?
Their twinkle covers bushes and trees
and glows against the houses. I feel that old
feeling of looking in from the outside.
Briefly I imagine I’m meditating. I’m looking
at myself from above. A fat earthworm
unearthed and bloated in the driveway. Even I have a heart.
Anytime now it’ll be spring again. First I’ll need
to drink a lot of tea. Heat up the car.
Oh, now I’m not meditating anymore.
Was I ever? When the windows fog
I’ll turn on the wipers, the defroster.
Wonder if ever again I’ll see flowers emerge.
Won’t their little expressions be otherworldly?
Won’t they achieve their own greatness
without even looking in the mirror? Their clean faces
scrubbed of any of the dirt they came from,
they’ll subside. Resume their longing
for the days when they had only
themselves to care for. Even the bees
will have had their fill of riches. The worms
will have done their good work. The soil will shrink,
dry out, and lie just as dormant as any old coffin. 

*

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Hole in the Head Review, Museum of Americana, Gargoyle, The Plath Poetry Project, The Ekphrastic Review, SurVision, and Bluestem Magazine. Anthologies her poems have appeared in include: Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall, Nancy Drew Anthology, and Lunation. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. She is poetry editor for the upcoming anthology, Ten Piscataqua Writers: https://www.tenpiscataqua.com/writers/. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaPurdy123 and her website: jessicapurdy.com

Night Work by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

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Night Work

In the lucid hours of insomnia
I build and multiply images—
a whole wall of unsleeping,

feel the stillness
of my husband’s body
against my unspooling.

I lift the necklace of marigolds,
a gift in Rishikesh, almost inhale
the-more-dirt-than-flower scent.

Now I’m on our road at dusk
in that echo of one gunshot.
It’s hunting season, everyone

wearing red or orange.
Where did that bullet land,
did it sink in living skin?

I am on a mission
to dig and dig
until the clink of bone,

and I find the rhyme
in love and blood.

*

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO. She has been a 30/30 poet for Tupelo Press, nominated for Best of Net, the Poetry Prize Winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a Finalist for Iron Horse National Poetry Month Award. She lives in the hills of Vermont. sarahdickensonsnyder.com