Dave Malone
I wake up in my bedroom not knowing.
It’s unclear if you’re stargazing
outside the tent in that shitty park
in Tonganoxie, Kansas. Or if you’re naked,
fridge-side rummaging for milk and any
sliver of chocolate kindness.
It’s so unclear I get lost
in tracing the topography of the white ceiling.
Tiny roads, mountains loom.
I can’t tell if I’m above all of it, gazing down,
or if I’m beneath it somehow,
hugging inside the earth’s endoderm
where I suffocate above core and mantle,
eager to surface like bluebirds I saw hatch once.
Milky bodies, blind, dumb birds.
I don’t hear you.
Absence of kitchen door percussion
that cuts out sleep. And I don’t feel you
outside, your pose tilted as if you could
catch Orion raining on your forehead.
Only this white haze of mountain
and country road that fades out
as it reaches the corners.
Dave Malone is the author of several books of poetry and a new ebook series, Seasons in Love (Trask Road Press), available at Smashwords and Kindle. His poems have appeared in Cave Region Review, decomP, Elder Mountain: Journal of Ozark Studies, Mid Rivers Review, San Pedro River Review, Spindrift, and Word Riot.