JITTERY NOCTURNE
Outside after a bad dream —no stars,
no canopy of leaves— just streets
and down those streets, like large
flat rocks in the middle of a stream, my neighbors’ houses.
•
But sometimes, walking around, straight ahead
on sidewalks, I correspond with arguments
swimming at the heart of houses, and move parallel
to their interiors: old clothes, crates,
canned peaches —everything
sinking to the bottom of the bottom of houses.
•
Rain, starting slowly, thuds
the metal bottom of a boat— a sound you know in the middle
of the night in houses. And there’s a current pulling
at the boat, the movement of debt— we do not
own these houses.
•
Often I am brushed on the leg —right in the kitchen!—
by a fish, yet my sisters trust the integrity of houses.
Lately I’m happy to be having the sex I am having
most often now, inside of houses.
Those tiny, inquisitive sea horses, flickering
here and there— how they addressed us we will remember in houses.
•
Later, like an allowance, the moon comes round: fat, white
Later the moon floods
the alleys, empties the rooms of our houses.
•
How I know I am not happens most often in houses:
creaking the floorboards, slowly breathing in houses.
ABOUT THE POET
Kate Northrop is a recipient of the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writers Award and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her recent poetry collections are Clean (Persea Books) and cuntstruck (C and R Press). Northrop is a contributing editor at The American Poetry Review and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wyoming. She lives in Laramie, WY.
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