Nick Patten  © 2008 All Rights Reserved

Dream Aubade

Not the familiar hours   
                        in the snooze’s seven minutes.

             School is cancelled

                       due to
                       snow. Not the phone:

                                                It rings,
                       it’s work:

don’t come in

             Hanging up, burrowing in.

we don’t need you

             Not the exam with no clothes
                                                   on, the one in Russian
don’t come in all week          

            or Greek. Like them both,
            only
                         you were there.
                                                  In the half-light
            between alarms I saw

                          your body:

                                                  familiar,
            beloved. My bed a question.

And the fit answer
                         you
                                                  made there, on the blue book
                         of my sheets.

 

Jill McDonough
Copyright © 2008

 

Jill McDonough’s work has appeared in Slate, the Threepenny Review, and the Nation. Her first book of poems, Habeas Corpus, fifty sonnets about executions in American history, is forthcoming from Salt Publishing. She’s a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

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