Just for the Night
not that it was firm in the REM recesses
of my mind, but rather like a fog of breath
like a paper bag left too long in the rain,
your face shreds into waterlogged pieces;
in winter air—suspended between fluttering
eyelids and that first knife of sunlight cutting
through blinds. And so, I remain, caught like a
fly in the complex web between wake and sleep,
my fingers fumbling for purchase on the jagged
rocks of my dream—if I can hold on longer,
you might turn from gas to solid; you might
pull on faded jeans with a hole in the pocket;
you might tuck the worn quilt under my chin,
and tell me it’s your turn to make breakfast.
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Arvilla Fee teaches English Composition for Clark State College. She has been published in numerous presses including Poetry Quarterly, Inwood Indiana, 50 Haikus, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Teach Write, Acorn, Bright Flash Literary Review and others. She also won the Rebecca Lard award for best poem in the Spring 2020 issue of Poetry Quarterly. What she loves most about writing is its kinetic energy—the ability to make people something. For Arvilla, poetry has never been about gaining literary genius status but about being in the trenches with ordinary people who will say, “She gets me.”
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 