Read More: A brief interview with Lindsay Adkins
4 AM
The bedroom will soon blush with sunrise
but is now a muted cool pebble.
Blue jays make their first creaks
of whistle chatter. A single brown
jackrabbit twitches in the damp grass.
You have gone back to sleep
after refilling the humidifier,
getting me water,
an extra pillow,
my illness a night blooming primrose
we must coax in your palm.
Your stomach is the canoe
docked at the lip of the river, pitching
in the ripple waves, thrumming
with breath against my back.
One of your legs between mine, I feel
the buzz of your body in its lines
like my own static. White petals from the dogwood
are shivered loose from their blossoms
by the humid spring breeze,
becoming slippery drops of moonlight—
a secret they couldn’t whisper
at any other hour.
Milkweed
You plucked a pod from its November stem
and with tawny thumbs eased the creaking
mouth asunder to free the silk fibers inside.
The wind wallowed them down the trail,
off to root elsewhere, and plumes of grey
grass waltzed with dead white wisps.
High as your hipbone, I clapped until
my hands pulsed red with chill and laughed
because the empty was overflowing.
Now, in the single-digit morning minutes
I watch your breath crawl across the clock.
I part your lips for water as warning, and think […]
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In Sickness
pushing the mower up the dusk hill
the blade humming with crickets
first the width of it then the full length
the lawn crisscrossed in green
sweating, panting, the night seeping in.
She and I sit by the window, look
out at the willow tree. She remembers
he always got to the grass beneath
its spray of fountain branches
no patch left undone
how he’d get tangled
swat whips of bark from his face.
She holds a glass of white
wine to her fissured mouth
the same way she used to slip
ribbons of my hair between
her lips as she braided them,
brushing her tongue over the rim,
tasting what this earth has given her.
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Lindsay Adkins is a poet, screenwriter, and actress currently living in the NYC area. A graduate of The University of Hartford and The Hartt School of music, she currently serves as an Assistant Supervisor of Print Production for the Random House Publishing Group and as a Poetry Editor for Vine Leaves Literary Journal. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, The 2River View, Muddy River Poetry Review, and the Aurorean, among others. lindsayadkins.net
Read More: A brief interview with Lindsay Adkins