Tag: Sleep

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

Sleep Skills by Andrea Potos

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Sleep Skills

These days I wake up tired
after hours skimming sleep’s
surface like a hungry bird, waiting.
They say it’s a fact of growing older,
to lose the skill for sleep infants
and teenagers mindlessly have.

I think of my Yaya, when I was a girl,
she was already dressed before first light;
her body telling her it was time
to live the day, tend to her needles and thread,
her yarn; and in her kitchen, the flour and water
in their porcelain bowls; a woman waiting for the morning
to rise under her hands.

*

Andrea Potos is author of several poetry collections, most recently Mothershell (Kelsay Books), A Stone to Carry Home (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), and Arrows of Light (Iris Press). Another collection is forthcoming in summer of 2021 entitled Marrow of Summer. She received the William Stafford Prize in Poetry, and several Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her poems can be found widely in print and online.