Erika Moya

BLANKETS


Before sleep
peels itself from my body
and goes off to hide in the corner by the hamper
until the sun sets again.

Before my breath is completely back to normal
and I think of all the things I have to do today,
of the twitching eyelid which may come
after the cups of coffee are done and
the nagging of utility bills and rent like
a little wife you want to write off and leave
but you can't.

Before sleep is removed of its nightly vestments
like a mass in rewind, the priest placing the host
back into its little fancy box un-blessed and us

taking our handshakes back.

Before all that--
I would imagine how you were
when we still loved one another
and how the heaviness of the blankets was really

your thigh over my thigh.

That imagined weight of someone else and how you owned it
for a few moments in the morning.
Before I admitted to myself what you had admitted to yourself
months before it sunk in
like the fact of a mother when you are four

and how the blankets were just that--
blankets.

Erika Moya is an MFA candidate at University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has previously appeared in Qaartsiluni, The Smoking Poet, Holly Rose Review, Toronto Quarterly, and the University of California Riverside's Art & Literary Journal-Mosaic.