Malachi Black
Insomnia & So On
- Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth
- each morning. Unfasten all the bones
- that make a head, and let me rest: unknown
- among the oboe-throated geese gone south
- to drop their down and sleep beside the outbound
- tides. Now there’s no nighttime I can own
- that isn’t anxious as a phone
- about to ring. Give me some doubt
- on loan; give me a way to get away
- from what I know. I pace until the sun
- is in my window. I lie down. I’m a coal:
- I smolder to a bloodshot glow. Each day
- I die down in my bed of snow, undone
- by my red mind and what it woke.
Against the Glass
- Rocking in my midnight robe, I am
- alive and in an eye again beside
- my kind insomniac, my phantom
- glass, companion and my only bride:
- this little window giving little shine
- to something. What I see I keep
- alive. I name the species, I define
- the lurch and glimmer, sweep and pry
- of eyes against the faint-reflecting glass
- by what they can and what I can’t
- quite grasp: I see a hand, still mine, outstretched
- in an attempt to catch the stars that drop
- as hailstones in the grass. I see them pass;
- these sleepless fingers slip from solid into gas.
Malachi Black is the author of the poetry collection Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a Lannan Literary Selection and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Black is assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.