Note: I’m giving myself a break, since I just finished working out revisions to a short story that I need to submit tomorrow and have been losing sleep over a kitten. This poem was written at around 2 am and has not been edited. It doesn’t have the insights or turns of phrase that my favorite works have, but I’ll call it a win because I managed to scribble this down before I needed to publish this thing.

Learn from my mistake, kids: figure out how schedules work. Especially when you tend to worry about kittens.

On nights

when the shadows are sticky, I remember

the cool water of your breath on my nape

at the beginning of the bedtimes of long ago

and

I hold on to the ice of your feet,

at the swell of my calf on summers,

arching towards that empty space

behind me.