What do I name that place between sleep and five a.m.
when I’m driving through the tropical fog;
light striking through the banyans?
How could I have been so deeply asleep
just moments ago pleading with you
not to drive your Buick Riviera
over the cliff into the ocean?
I wake up floating on the door to a sacred cabin
that I will never open again.
I wake up floating on a piano key.
I wake up wearing the life jacket
of your voice.
Or, you are under the bed
as I struggle with your strong arms
to lift you onto the mattress.
“Silly man”
I say, “you cannot sleep under the bed.”
Then I wake up,
holding your ashes.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 5.
P. J. Sutton holds an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. She is the winner of the George Starbuck Creative Writing Fellowship, the Snyder Prize, and a Glimmer Train award winner. She authored Pocket Gospel and the award-winning Burning My Birth Certificate. Her poetry has been featured in BAP in 2000, 2009, 2017, and in the 2013 Scribner’s 25th Anniversary edition of BAP’s The Best of the Best American Poetry. Sutton taught Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and lectured at MIT for their series, “The Pleasures of Poetry.” She is one-quarter Cherokee and grew up on Lac du Flambeau Indian Reservation.
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