Poetry Nightmares


Before we turn out the lights
I read poetry to her.
Sometimes I don’t even know
what the poem is about
but she listens, accepts each poem
like another blanket
pulled down from the closet,
stretched across the bed.
Often in the night
she wakes in a fever,
images of bodies thrown over a wall
tumbling like sheep to slaughter.
Or the clacking of consonants
mechanical as rifle bolts,
her mattress too soft
like dirt on a fresh grave.
I ask in the morning how
she slept and she says,
“Poetry nightmares.”
So I try to keep poems to myself
but they gestate in the mouth
and even from my sleep she says
she can hear me whisper,
watch my lips move,
syllables shining with saliva
on the verge of being swallowed again.