• Father
she curls on this bed between us every night since she entered the world,
and dreams, muscles twitching and little jerks. the road my sleep takes to
escape is armed, too, with checkpoints. drifting off, I see us from a tower’s
height, ants trapped in the shadow of the shoe. she winds into herself on the
bed tight as a fiddlehead. bombs seal shut her eyes, but my hands, her
mother’s hands, no hands are big enough to cover her ears. once I told her
to press her ear to mine to hear my love for her drumming and she still does,
soft cheek to bristle cheek, little face big face framed in thick dark curls
• Child
is it hot will it rise will it turn on its side, it, it, what is this thing on Mommy
Daddy’s bed where I wriggle into their arms when I wake up, the ceiling’s a
hole, grandma’s room upstairs gone, roof of cousin’s room the sky. they say
bomb but a bomb blows itself to pieces when it blows to pieces and covers
the street with toys clothes books everything, a bomb breaks, I mean breaks
everything into pieces. what is this thing sizzling on the bed. last week we
ran calling, we called, we ran, to cousins under the pile of walls, big cousin
baby cousin, oh cousin, and right now someone’s clamped my arm, pulling
me from the room, from what’s on the bed, longer than the bed, huge with
hate for who I am
• Woman
my sister calls our fragments “bomb sleep” that flees through flames, over
spilled nails and crushed glass. burning, cutting its feet, breaking its bone
arches. bomb sleep she says is a lover who leaps from your arms, slams the
bedroom door on the way out. bomb sleep she says is our mother’s
surgeon’s hand pressed on her heart’s geyser when the electricity was cut,
the generator in the prison of the blockade. was sleep ever not bomb
fragments, I ask. ever the overnight guest who cleaned up after herself,
plumped the cushions, wiped the teacup’s ring off the table before you
reached for the dishtowel. tidied the place up. looked out for us. had our
backs. rearranged her schedule to stay the extra day. no, my sister says,
never
Click here to read Denise Bergman on the origin of the poem.
Image by Bill Rand on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
