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Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss

to explain this place you’ve returned to from above;

cedar along a broken shore, twisting in a wake of fog.

I’ve lived in rooms with others, of no place and no mind

trying to bind a self inside the contagion of words while

your eyes open the night’s slow static. At a loss

to understand all that I cannot say, as if you came

upon the infinite simply by thinking and it was

a shore of broken cedar twisting in a wake of fog.

If I moan from an animal throat it is in hope you

will return to me what I lost learning to speak.

Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss

to ever know the true terminus of doubt, the limits of skin.

As long as you hold me I am doubled from without and within:

a wake of fog unbroken, a shore of twisted cedar.

I will press myself into potential, into your breath,

and maybe what was lost will return in sleep once I see

your eyes open into the night’s slow static, at a loss.

Broken on a shore of cedar. We twist in a wake of fog. 

A Wake

Liz Howard

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