Dysphoria

After making love to me for the first time since I miscarried
you say: I love you my almost wife.

It has been 6 weeks and some days
since I caught you in a betrayal.

Living feels harder with you
in my life, stirring up chaos, a smattering of
disorder.

Awake late at night under a blanket
of sleepless overwhelm

while you snore next to me
Snuggly in a cocoon of denial.

The wind stirs and reminds me
I am alive.

There is time to
get out.

There is time to
escape this tumult,

time to shield myself from your empty promises,
broken.

Like us.
Like you.

*

Mikela Bjork (she/her) is a queer creative, scholar and mother. She is a tenured professor at the University of Redlands in the School of Education and the co-director of the Center for Educational Justice. Her poetry has been published in Intima: A journal of narrative medicine, The Bombay Literary Review, and (forthcoming) Cutthroat A Journal of the Arts. Her creative non-fiction piece entitled, “How we Met” was a finalist in the 2022 Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival. Her writing centers around social (in)justice, identity formation, motherhood, womxnhood, capitalism and sexuality.