Sleep Monster Growls Beneath the Mattress

I Go to School in America

• At 5 AM I stir from sleep.
• go to school in America.
• Deep bruise sky lightens into cool
• streaks of purple, gray. Rooster
• calls the sun to the horizon;
• his song pours promise onto
• streets brittle with consequences.
•  

• Morning, gauzy with ideals.
• Just try to reconcile the wide
• discrepancies between dreams and
• unrelenting rhythms of work.
• In my school, we are not taught to
• finger our happiness, but to
• whisper the stories of power.

• Leaves of newspaper descend from
• crevice of sky; unrelenting 
• rain plants ideals of power
• in our minds but still leaves us parched.
• In school I read about monsters.
• When I become one, I will not
• wonder at the bruised possible.

Sleep Monster Growls Beneath the Mattress

• Please don’t imagine me in this crummy
• room, waking late Sunday morning, eyelids
• crusted with dreams. Pain in my teeth. I’ve missed
• church. Smell of smoke on the hot wind. Busted
• radio whines in my brain. Stale donuts
• on a plate, cigarettes stubbed out in white
• sprinkles. I’m in the bed of my childhood —
• sheets thin, ceiling wisped with grime, listening
• to barely remembered laughter somewhere.
• I wish I could forget the joke, but time
• is a permanent blister, a first clue
• to the devolution we turn blind to.
• And you, my monster, please don’t disappear.
• Be like the one-eyed cat marching along
• my skin, cooling my sickness, remaining
• with me even after rain scars the ground.

365 Midnights

• At night I like to stomp around
• the deserted golf course like a
• dinosaur in red heels, alone
• but fearful of nothing. The moon,
• bloated with fog, doesn’t feel so
• unknown, feels like an ancestor
• set sail to another country.

• At the harbor, I wear black stockings.
• Sky gray with the heavy music
• of petroleum. Stars love in
• a language I’ve forgotten.
• I’m cautious to listen, don’t
• want to find out all the secrets
• since the spaceships blasted their night.

• In the red morning, voices of
• bees in shade make a harmonic
• pudding I lick from the pavement.
• My bones cannot wait for night’s turn,
• for a sliver of holiday
• to come to the city, starved for
• beauty, feeding on the last home.

Terry Wolverton is author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, including Embers, a novel in poems, and Insurgent Muse: Art and Life at the Woman’s Building, a memoir. A new poetry collection, Ruin Porn, will be published at the end of 2017. She is the founder of Writers at Work, a creative-writing studio in Los Angeles, and affiliate faculty in the MFA writing program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She is also an instructor of Kundalini yoga and meditation.