Tag: Sleep

Two Poems by Sara Eddy

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Going to Seed

I left lettuce flouncing out in container boxes
ready for picking. I was on the road, ready
for the expansion of travel. Lettuce can’t hold me.

You want a pretty big container for head-growth
and root-spread. It’s almost too on the nose: harvest
leaves from the outside to encourage inner growth.

Lettuces shouldn’t sit next to apples or bananas.
Ethylene causes rapid decay, like too much time
in the city, your feet on concrete.

Lettuce must be eaten fresh, taken as it is, demands
fealty to its moment. It will go to seed before I get back,
and I’ll toss it on the compost for the rabbits and worms.

*

Uphill

I’m driving around looking for a farm stand when my doctor calls.
You don’t know how to be alive she says, something like that.

I don’t really hear her. I’m thinking about hills, where they come from,
whether they feel us scrambling up and down. Whether all the hills

I’ve climbed add up to a mountain, and when it is I’ll be over the hill.
Everything about hills. Now she’s saying you’ve forgotten how to sleep.

I wake up 45x an hour, she says, which isn’t really sleeping at all, is it?
I feel like arguing: that’s the way I’ve always slept, and no one ever complained.

But truly it is harder now to get up these hills. Maybe she’s right,
I don’t know how to be alive. I do know that fresh vegetables

are good for poetry. Hills are good for poetry. And lying awake in bed wondering
how it has come to this, that we don’t even know how to sleep in our tired bodies.

*

Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, and her chapbook of poems about plants, Jewelweed, is forthcoming from Finish Line Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.

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

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.