January - Poem 5

Aquifer / Haley Bosse

Broken ankle, bruising like a peach
And propped in the rot of your bedroom.
Memory of the empty church, chairs stacked
And the flickering light barely grazing your face.

It’s cloudset in the street,
The scrape of your calluses on broken concrete,
The shiver you indulge in the place of desperation.

Between the pain, emptiness,
A gift of atoms, invisible
Unless you attend to them:
The worms surfacing from puddles,
Their wriggle in your palm,
The undersides of dripping leaves,
Greenbright between their veins.

Later, when you clutter with distractions,
The worms call out with inching rustle.
Place your softened feet on pavement,
Trace the shape of emptiness again.

no one young knows the names of things  / Jess Bowe

i wander barefoot through the wind-pressed field, high grasses bowing to the soil, birds glittering in color, high and low, sky to Mother. clouds of every weight and form gather and drift. i pay attention. i offer up my most abundant treasure and gift it to the land. white peeks from just before me, rough and weathered bone in my palm. science asks me to drop a skull into a box. Mystery says decide to not know. i imagine a story instead of a face. i imagine survival and what it asks. i imagine i am not god. i imagine i’m as common as the wind, as ordinary as any leaf left for winter’s bed. teeth and jaw. can i call you friend? can i blur the border between body and light? can i rewind, count inward, become alive in the heartwood at my center? can i become new? i carry remnants of a living i’ve never seen, packed away in my pockets of feathers and stone.

Progress can be beautiful  / Joanna Lee

There was a moment on the bridge this morning

blankly driving south to work
across the river in the leftmost lane
as we daily do when out
of nowhere,
all the small presence of traffic, all
the weight of the coming day, all the fear of failure

that tucks itself into my socks,
all the terror of losing you that never really
vanishes
vanished into just the way
the sun smacked the new downtown highrises

crimson gold, a gleam like god herself pausing,
entranced,
as she traces her name in light.

Passwords  / Thomas Page

How many ways can I type recognizable 
combinations of your first grade teacher 
or your first pet or where you met your spouse 
before online hackers access your health records?

Your healthcare provider seems to think everyone 
is out to unearth every single note 
between you and the doctor about flu
shots and medications and test results; like, why?

What purpose would there to be to unearth records 
about all the times I’ve administered 
medication your network of doctors 
seem to disagree or even to disavow? 

What is the value of knowing how many times 
you and I have driven together to 
appointments that say the same, terminal 
diagnoses that washes its hands from treatments?

How could someone impersonate all memories 
that are sewn together in these doctor’s 
notes, hewn by the clinical manner which 
your experiences are totaled in those numbers?

Can a person, a patient, be sold for crypto 
on the black market blockchain for some tryst 
impersonating your numerous years 
for some digital exchange of goods or services?

Where’s the humanity in that?

Sonnet for Fred  / Sarah Paley

Wilma goes to bed but Fred puts
Baby Puss out and gets locked out
himself. “Wil-ma!” he screams to no
avail. No one answers – not his friend
Barney. Not Betty or Bam-Bam. He sleeps
outside which shouldn’t be a hardship
for a caveman but it is. It’s cold and he
doesn’t have any shoes and only three toes –
not like he has any to spare to frost bite.
People night think I’m an alarmist for worrying
so about Fred – locked out of his house every
night. Hapless father, for-granted spouse –
he suffers for us all and we switch channels –
hoping he’ll make it to morning.

grace and mud  / Amy Snodgrass

after Daniel Halpern & Seamus Heaney

expecting the northern lights
then expecting them to crumble

into glisten across mud
that white man and his canon

me holding my pen and 
my rage fades to the exhaustion 

of impotence and I cannot hold
but it's time to be getting on with the getting up now

and this other white man, well, he’s digging things 
up, out of the bog and me, he lightens my load

like swirling arcs of orange so obvious and so rare
hindsight shatters myth into endless renditions

and it’s time to be getting on now, getting 
up now and expecting the grace now

the grace rising up now out of the mud now and up

January - Poem 4

Extant Horizons  / Haley Bosse

Their blue a promise
of elsewhere

as much as proof
of hereness

though you wish
here wouldn’t bother

though you wish
these cousin mountains

would split beneath you
and drop you in the sea

just like your distant
finny relatives

gazing up at the illusion
of bright white nothing

dancing beyond your shrinking bubbles
and then behind your tired eyes.

body heat / burning haibun  / Jess Bowe

new year and i’d like to be
an old me, one still at a crossroads, one
fooled by the costume of loneliness
worn by spacious possibility, the void dressed
up in a bed too big, a carrot in the shape
of a face; i’d tell her to think about 
it, the sense to run, the voice of sunrise
screaming to her bones look how far you can
stretch out your arms! look, i know 
you’re tired of learning how to keep the heat
on, tired of wearing chainlink over the soft
of your silvering coat. i know you wonder
if your hands will sink into more than sherpa
in the middle of the dark. can i be a spark
of a star, dancing across the backroads?
or a scroll of light, carriage of warning,
constellation in the shape of an arrow
go this way! this is a map from your future,
and an accident has been reported.
you are no longer on the fastest route
to joy. pull over and warm yourself
with kindness. it’s just the cold talking,
and the heating costs are much too high.

the voice of sunrise: 
soft wonder, you are the route
to joy, warm with kindness

Poem to a physicist (reprise)  / Joanna Lee

Bitter texts still sit
gathering the dust of the unrequited
on the lowest bookshelf : Schrödinger;
Einstein;          Dirac;              I wish
I had learned my quantum mechanics harder,

learned how the waves of us can crash into
one
another
and devastate or

leave no trace, infinite             
footprints
whose hum no human skin can feel,
on a beach where God bathes without sunscreen.                               

Watching from another ocean,
could you yet teach me
to temper my frequency &

bend it
round an ending
that doesn’t land broken
in a puddle
on the floor? or

demonstrate, at least,               how to encounter                    elastically:
one vibration smiling across a room, and we both walk away, un-

wounded?

Or just (to hit all the classic buzzwords) put time                   

in reverse, do this shit over? the homeless cats
that sleep on my front porch
waking up tomorrow to a slightly
different sun.
Higher
math never had a damn thing
to do with love.

Bloodstains  / Thomas Page

I’ve had to clean up blood twice,
scrubbing the red off the beige 
carpet—mellowed with age.
Wouldn’t it be oh so nice
if I never had to see 
you apologize to me
for letting body slice 
or a gashed fleck of toenail 
to flood my clogged pores. Wail
in unison while I ice 
away the labored pain 
while I let floating guilt pang
me. I continue to roll dice 
allowing myself to care 
for you alone like a bear 
lost in the winter. I splice 
triangles of bandaids
over the wound as I bade 
myself to watch the dear price 
you pay for my negligence.
My troubled, labored conscience
remembers the Prince song thrice 
about blood and rain mixing 
into purple life nixing 
all familial deaths    

On My Way to Lunch for Spicy Jicama Salad and Rissoto Nero  / Sarah Paley

It’s grey, grey, grey on Great Jones Street today
with clouds drifting behind a scrim of mist,
punctuated by exclamation points
of dangling yellow traffic signals.
This vague day sets everything in sharp
focus – the red, yellow, green, red, yellow,
green disappear down the Bowery as wet
wheels hiss on the slick black and I remember
the cow pie on a summer day in a field
of golden hay and know that what thou
lovest remains, the rest is dross and what
thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee
and I remember to try to remember to come
back to any small part of you.

River Street Fire House, September 2001  / Amy Snodgrass

for Ilyce

There’s a beach I go to when I feel lost.
Accessed only by a narrow overgrown path.
Black sand with sparkling flecks. Black cliffs 
with ledges just right for swinging. 

We used to be so every-minute-close I would call you if I sneezed.
We always knew exactly what we meant. Now we are worlds apart.  

Our sons have turned 18.  
You taught me how to pump breast milk. 
You found me the right daycare. 
You clipped that car seat right in.

But– even before all that, and certainly 
before all this– we were lost together

on that awful day and in all 
the weeks after. We had no idea. 

Remember that small, two-bay fire station? 
How we found it one night, just around my corner?  

“Let’s light a candle.” 

It lasted all of two minutes: “Ladies, 
we need you to leave now, and thank you.” 

We had no idea how young we were.

I wonder– where do you go now when you feel lost?
Take me someday? You’ve never seen this beach. 

Someday, I’ll bring you. I’ll say, “Remember that time 
you brought me milk during the lockdown?” and you’ll say 
“Remember that time on the bench by the football field?”
and I’ll say, “Remember that time you said that thing and saved my life?

We will swing our legs, soak in the salt, and know exactly 
what we mean: we were, we are, so lost, so lucky, so lucky, so lost.

January - Poem 3

At the end of the lane, a house with staining carpets  / Haley Bosse

At the carving fork’s furthest tip,
The graveyard where my sister shattered stone,
The borders of letters long softened
Into a face tucked away from fall rains 
And gazing down into the fairy circle
Thumping stone by stone 
From our palms into the moss, 
Small weights sifted from the dust 
At the edge of the nearby field,
Plucked from the ever-crowning Earth
And piled by whoever tended the wheat
Shushing as we layered upward,
Ring becoming clicking fence 
And then a leaning wall, 
Any calls back for dinner muffled 
With the fading light 
Weaving through the Old Man’s Beard, 
The drooping arms of oaks brushing sweaty hair,

My sister’s arms cast out to catch the stone
Between them as she fell, 
The snap and scrape of one more body 
Throwing shadows through the shade. 

resolution  / Jess Bowe

out the window, the backyard is barely breathing.
i wonder whether i am looking out or looking in
the mirror between us.
she yawns in the darkened morning
and stretches her pale face against
the sky. i stretch thin
and flat against the night. 

across the hall
i see you in memory, your small body
hollowed with song. it’s been years
since you saved me
from the frostbite of winter,
kept my heart warm and rhythmic.

across the hall, i see you, 
handfuls of tears, a fear so high
i wonder what you might look like
behind its walls as you 
stand there in front of me.

as close to death as she appears, 
a mother’s silence has a sound,
a primal birthing-place of what eventually
crescendos through the orchestra green.

i am a mother 
in the quietest places,
a daughter adopting the patterns
of Her seasons. 

she taps her cold fingers
on the walls of my room, to say:
we wear teeth, even in the snow,
a necessary danger born
of unquestionable love.

Tanka as Dream Sequence  / Joanna Lee

Up at Dad’s

Up at Dad’s, the deer
curl heavy into daylight,
their white plumes bright flags
to break his long loneliness
into tolerable waves.

Three snows come and gone
before an old year passes
leaving its sharp breath
etched in echoes of regret,
cold hands reaching for cold stars

Leaffall of decades
lingers in the woods’ hollows
collarbone-deep like
swimming holes for winter fear,
cannonballed oblivions

Not the same, you say,
this season, its bright baubles
that hum and lie flat
since your chest rises even,
and dying feels further off.

Still

My hand holds heavy
to yours in the hospital
elevator, sinks
like gravity each checkup,
each new smirk of a season

God’s laughing, maybe
into the wind that howls round
the parking garage
outside the cancer center—
it is always colder there.

We take the long way,
valley road by the old tracks,
the way you don’t like
me to drive at night alone,
where I pretend fearlessness.

Reprieve

Methodical plunge
blunt knife into midwinter
red flesh excisions
then tie stems with summer tongues,
make cherry margaritas

Home again           

Yard sleeps, unlovely
and hard in its winter coat,
still-thorned roses climb
past the windows, penciling
there is no escape from rest.

The white lights you strung
and taught to shine through the night
flicker a welcome
against the cold long darkness
of a city rigid shut

It’s the same, I say,
the loneliness, the cold star
reaching back across
bent midnights to find heartbeats—
to find us, in the moonlight.

Later

Neighbor’s porch chimes fall
into stillness as you sleep
with untroubled breath;
wind has died just a little—
silent prayer of gratitude

 Dr. Pepper Shot Tips    / Thomas Page

It takes about a month to fill one bottle—
one empty bottle—of Dr. Pepper with shot 
tips. I have to be careful not to pierce 
a hypodermic needle through my fingers 
as I juggle the alcoholic prep pads 
to moisten the germs from your skin. 
Every so often, I do puncture 
the skin I inherited from your side 
of the family—pink and white and freckled—
skin I have to keep shrouded in cotton 
and wool; skin labeled “rice paper” 
by the makeup company; skin possibly 
sold in stores under the label “bruised peaches”
or possibly “plum flesh; too ripe to eat;”
skin that my mother slathered in spf 
one hundred because of your time 
in the ultraviolet rays; the skin I lived
in when I impersonated your mannerisms
when I played the dad in The Pajama 
Game when my mother pointed out 
who exactly I was pretending to be. 

LOVE  / Sarah Paley

Blindfolded, we know the way. We’re familiar with the shifting
landscape. Our well-worn boots know those overgrown roots –
there just to trip us up. We know the streams with their sudden
drop-offs, slippery rocks, and, of course, we know where the quicksand lies.

We know who lives where and how to find them and there they’ll always be –
at the kitchen table, dancing in the bar, sleeping in the den, hiding up that tree.
The one we climbed together and where I knew you’d never leave.

We didn’t know the steady breeze would turn into a gust and blow away
the permanent, the for-granted and the dear. So much for popping
by for a drink, to shoot the shit, to play canasta, to roast a chicken, to tell a joke,
to sing that song, to tell what only you would get or to remind you of the time…

Intern at LoveMoney Clothing  / Amy Snodgrass

  for Tyreik Prentice

Because money follows love, the website says.
Not because you’re supposed to love money, right? 

I told you about the salmon in Alaska.
You were mad I was gone. Remember?

You are so full of love in a world so full 
of frantic upstream flipping and frenetic 
addict flailing. The salmon. They flap and flip 

like the hands of the man on the corner:
just as red, scales and scabs, desperate, 

not knowing they are about to die, 
both knowing they are about to die.

The man’s name is Chester, you tell me.  
“Chester,” you say, “You come on in, old man, 
and you eat. Eat for free. Eat because I love you.” 

You hold his hands inside yours and they still.  
My heart son, please, when everyone— 

like the almost-dead— pale blood-red— salmon
like the crack-fueled shaking— death of nature’s making

—when everyone is all on about the money

stop—

           hold the fiending until it stills into love

—hold the love — hold it to heal

the obsessive money-fueled drive to death—

January - poem 2

Stitched Up  / Tess Adams

They closed me with catgut—
a surgeon’s neat crosshatch
where the world had split;
my body a torn thing
stitched back into use.

Sutures tugged and burned
rough twine pulled through silk.
Each knot a small salvation
each scar a line of text
I’d never planned to write.

They mended my belly
my bladder, my broken gate—
made me a patchwork of losses
that somehow held.

I trace the seams—
their raised relief, their quiet shine.
I wear them as testament—
not to what was lost
but to what was re-made.

Unwanted Winter  / Haley Bosse

Wooded midday. Snow nearly
Scarring light. Wondering at
Quick damp. Crackle 
Of the plastic sled. Electric blue
Window of your thighs. How 
A breath catches. Then
Scatters out behind you. Coats
The sharpened hill. How
Even now you fly. 

Mother Magick  / Jess Bowe

three ingredient pasta dinner
tastes like firesitting feels;
for this moment,
you are warm and tethered
to meaning. you are close
to each other and binded
by story and songs and the scent
of smoke prays its way into
every fiber stitched across
your body. you are blessed
by memory.

in every room a song,
in every crisis, you know
what it means to be safe
and you do not learn the word

Crisis or broken poor without;
you know what it means
to have music sung in your doorway
while your blankets
wrap around you like angels
and you say them by name
uriel michael raphael sandalphon

the oven cracked open down the hall
sends heat and you never ask
because you never suspect
your mother is cracking open;
all you hear is melody
painting photos on blank walls.

under the night, poetry is written
in an upstairs room, candle flames
dance their shadows
and your mother, alone,
is sobbing her thanks to the close-up
clouds of winter.

you won’t know the furniture
she’s moved, the stacks of clothing
in the garage, the grief she’s shaken
hands with at all hours. morning is a rising
thing and her well-trained gaze 

catches the shadow of a child
wrapped around her waist
glowing on the back wall of the kitchen,
coffee and bread in the air.

magick comes from nothing.
there’s no need for it
when the world always knocks
at your door.

in the empty night, with bare hands
and feet to kiss the cold of the ground
that’s where it strikes,
each spell
and intention,
each noticed wonder unobstructed
by Things; what can you do
with the Invisible

that opens your eyes
to tiny white faeries
grazing the lips of pink
peonies— that pauses your steps
in the driveway
the sun spilling gold across
your rooftop,
the rain
calling out to light
splitting in spectrum

speaking
‘blessed are the mothers’
who make peace in their walls
with ghosts and crumbs
and still know god
at the end of the night
at the bridge of morning
and still wrap arms around
the world with room in their pockets

and somehow make
fireworthy
three ingredient pasta dinners. 

Haibun: Second draft for a requiem / Joanna Lee

siempre quiero estar contento
triste no valgo la pena

                                    --Estopa, “Te Vi Te Vi,” Destrangis

You were conceived in a season of darkness, of regret and little hope for a brighter anything. Born sour, plucked by hand and secreted into a clear plastic cup during January workdays that began before dawn and ended after night had made its daily return. Washed and paper-towel-dried, you were set with a half dozen brothers into special dirt and a small peat pot, anxiously perched in the sill of the most southern-facing window. You, miracle of mid-winter: those first two baby-fine leaves like a second shot at love. And like love, you grew. At two inches you caught the light as the days lengthened; at four, you were given a pot of your own: clay of some desert earth shaped in promise. Paychecks were poured into your fast-drain soil, and you soaked up each successive summer on the front porch where daylight lingered longest. Come fall, you’d be carried icon-like to the back of the house, your own room lit with your own fluorescent lights, defying the shortness of the days. Soon, your leaves were as big as a hand, fragrant as tea. You grew thorns—thorns! Spring rolled into summer and your branches reached for the sky, their willowy lengths dividing, thickening, hardening into arabesques. But there came a turning point. Some plague, one overlong winter, and for the past eighteen months, you’ve been slowly dying. The leaves dropping soundless, you ceasing to look upward. Each day a slow shear. No more drinking of the light. No more green laughter. Like me, you will never bear fruit. It is the burden of one who has planted the seed to put it to rest at its failing. One midwinter evening I carry you from the house to let the night seep through all at once—leaf, stem, trunk, to the cradle of your roots.     

Eres de los que no vuelan
presidario del silencio frio,
frio que la sangre hiela

Placeholder   / Thomas Page

Most people understand how serious
it is when I say what you’re dealing with 
“Oh, I know a guy’s son,” or “a classmate,”
or whatever distant connection they have 
with what they think you’re going through. 
People always wanted to commiserate 
about what how it must be like to be you
or to deal with you or to deal with it. 
Secrets are like the foil over candies—
torn open rather easily by children;
savored in the mouth as it melts. 

Time Travel  / Sarah Paley

Memories have a gravitational pull
though I seem to become untethered
and find myself floating like a novice 
astronaut taking in the galaxy of my childhood –

the iron key
turning reluctantly
in the grandfather clock

      the slurp of the mud
      swallowing my red boots
      as my sister pulls me from above

      a fireball’s dye
      alarming my red
      tongue

      the smell of lilacs, pine needles,
gasoline, cut grass, the rotting trunk
I sat on for hours in the woods

These comets hurtle towards me or hang
like dumb dead stars insisting on existing.

What are we without them? What do goldfish remember?
Involuntary traveler, there is no cure for memory.

Lap Swimming in Costa Rica  / Amy Snodgrass

(after living here for 12 years)

Somehow I’m still surprised every year
when these December winds make waves,

shaking my early evening laps 
into a frenzy: unwelcome and hard.

Here these winds –warm and long–
mean Christmas. These winds make 
everyone around me glad with tidings.

But even after all this time, I long 
for the dry scent of snow coming, for
the pine wreaths, the toffee and the elves,
and I wonder when my mother will come.

The winds shake the crane cables:
abandoned, shameful, and smooth.
Arcs of half-painted steel above the pool
claw into what’s left of the sun.

I pause and I float, watching others 
on the deck gesticulate as they discuss 
the next stages of construction. I watch 
them wave and point in the direction 
of the winds, and smile 
their holiday smiles. 

To them, the winds are faith.

To me, the winds are dust-filled omens,
darkening my lane with whipping dry leaves—

I don’t know how I got here.

January - Poem 1

Bog Body, Also Known As  / Haley Bosse

Sulfurskin 
Softbone 
Loosebreath
Breakthrough
Bottlerocket
Bricabrac
Songshush
Winterwait
Weightpuddle
Properform
Chloroplast
Sugarcrust
Crumblebuttal 
Cornerstore
Gathergutter
Groanlift 
Pittersplatter
Bedmade 
Lornlace
Twistslumber
Covetcradle
Gonedaughter 
Twinface
Allrefrain

under pressure  / Jess Bowe

saturn moans with a storm
composed of a thousand 
flavors of misery. 

hydrogen gets a hug. 

we stand at the glass 
and cheer 
for what we haven’t survived,
what exists without us,
unflagged. 

she holds me between
thumb and index,
a honeyed marble,
all 5’6 of me,
every bucket of midnight 
grief, volcanic paradise 
joy spewing, flame-spattered 
across the blackened 
forever-night canvas;

every color witnessed,
every tuesday afternoon
down to the palm of a hand. 

isn’t it glorious, the way time turns 
inside-out the moment we become
fully occupied with atmosphere? 

every human story, a game of jacks 
on the ringed bedroom floor. 

Eschatological meditations while doing the dishes on New Years Eve  / Joanna Lee

For some days now, the light
has grown—just a bit, as it does:

a few minutes’ sunshine
at the end of a long dark prayer.

And maybe that’s all we can ask
of the things for which we ask,

a brighter ending, or less clouded eyes
with which to see

even the smallest moments, like
watching the grease

from last night’s dinner
break its slick hold on the plate

when we apply a little Dawn,
a little elbow, the oil becoming

streak, then bubble, then sliding
into the oblivion of the sink’s drain.

A clearing away before beginning again.    
No, it ain’t quite the thing with feathers, this

clock tipping the first handful
of earth onto last year’s grave, it ain’t

dandelion wishes or confetti-on-crystal—yet,
dishes cool and drying on the rack,

we’ll pop that bargain store bottle
of bubbly just the same.   

Cop-Out / Thomas Page

I’ve seen it mentioned a lot on TV
to explain away an absent actor 
or pencil in a cause of departure. 
“This kind of tragic thing happens many
times a day,” they say, “just make sure to see
your doc, just to check” patting the bereaved 
tissues all over the floor. They might play 
Coldplay or Snow Patrol or even Creed
while the heavy, steel double doors close out 
this season’s big twist— a fan favorite killed 
off screen— syncopated with the baseline,
Hollywood white teeth enrobed by cherry gums 
pantomiming grief, collapsed on the floor
liquid tears rolling down in a straight line: 
I only remember how quiet it was when they told me. 

BREUGHEL  / Sarah Paley

Across the street on the sixth-floor missing windowpanes are billowing plastic
on this windy, cold day. A floor below a Puerto Rican flag serves as a curtain.

An army of delivery men congregate outside the Hub. They talk, argue, whisper,
shout, sing in Wolof, French, Fula, Mandinka, Jola, Soninke, Arabic

They wear their unofficial uniform of black hoody, thick canvas pants,
and helmets. A sea of orange and green bicycles extends around the corner.

Prayer mats are snapped open and placed on the sidewalk facing Mecca.
Their comrades huddle and picnic under scaffolding eating mountains of rice

bought from the Halal truck parked mid-block. Cooing pigeons, their chests bulging,
heads thrusting, pace like generals inspecting the troops as they wait

for grains to drop. At the bakery, young couples order lattes and Scandinavian pastries.
They try to navigate their heavily insulated children

while pushing stroller tanks. It’s recess time at the Eastern New York Community School
and a gaggle of adolescent girls, armed crossed, heads askew,

try to convey their utter disinterest to the middle-aged coach who holds the basketball.
On the other side of the playground boys attempt to look menacing

but can’t resist busting out to chase one another in circles. Two customers sit in the window
of The Barber’s Blueprint. A black and white pit bull in an argyle sweater pulls

his master towards a tree. A firetruck, red lights flashing, is pulled up outside Andrea’s
Pizza Oven. A firefighter emerges with a slice

And yes, overhead, that’s Icarus falling and flailing through the blue sky.

Late December, 2025  / Amy Snodgrass

the sun took so long to rise 
we thought it wouldn’t,
my daughter and I  
–it took so long

–the stretch of Illinois highway spilling 
in front of us to the horizon– 

we felt apocalyptic:  the world 
seemed intent on stopping, ready-ing 
          itself to re-start, defiant

we laughed, used the words freaky 
and eerie, doomsday, foreboding

a great moment of connection and we
will relish it in reverse but still
I longed for lorazepam and still
she slide-glanced on repeat to the east 

we came to the brink
I felt my panic tide up to crest
she googled sunrise time today

the white lines barrelled us along our way

and eventually, yes, the darkness heaved into dullness 
and the gray glowed around the edges

my daughter relaxed into relief, laughing 

I myself tightened (and now here’s|
the secret I’m telling only you, so sshhhh!)
I tightened into what felt like–
it couldn’t be, though–     disappointment.

I mean, the day 
rose, the drive ended, and
everything, even after all that, everything 

was just fine