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Nights I sleep with a love charm
beneath my pillow
Thistles, nettles matting empty plains of my mind
Days I
feel the cotton candy of my medication
stoning me out of this world but
it’s only a mask. Underneath the mask
is the truth of thousands of bees
abuzz around me, never never never
My longing for you
is broken as strings, tongued as coins
The bees collect around the hive;
the whole night tilts toward the bottle tree,
the awful emptiness of a tree hung by glass
Nights I don’t really
sleep, just finger the owl mask
of my sex, particulate as feathers
while the world tilts further,
into its heart-shaped impossibility—
Amy Newlove Schroeder is author of The Sleep Hotel, winner of the Field Prize.
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