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Emily Franklin: I like to worry

September 9, 2022 by PBQ Leave a Comment

about other people with their lights on at odd hours— 

the neighbor who maybe cannot sleep, too, with the TV 

casting its half-life shadows within a house only partly lit in

our town with no street lights, only the flat moon languid in

its inability 

 

to ever sleep at night, the way worry or hormones 

or wine or more worry wriggle the legs, coil the sheets and I am left

to pee again or wander even without moving, just my eyes counting

whose windows are rimmed in light or which sounds belong to which

animal— 

 

we’ve caught them on video, skunk and fox, fisher cat 

slinking its cruelty across the field while another house whose inhabitants

I don’t know are awake and it could be anything—excitement because 

 

a new baby is coming, or diagnosis grief, or desire for skin or cake. And

all of those imaginings are of course my own self splintered into the houses

of others and it could be self-centered to understand that or maybe gentler

to say we are all awake in different rooms longing for different but the

same things and looking always 

looking for light. 

Filed Under: Issue 103, Poetry, Poetry 103 Tagged With: Emily Franklin

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