grief card 27

---art and prompt by Michelle Lynn Dyrness, Working with Fragments

I can make myself wake

into sleep paralysis, descending first

a stair in my consciousness

as my body relaxes, walking

and walking through corridors

and train platforms until I see a hooded

figure into whose face I find my waking

paralyzed, who has grown

more and more unavoidable,

whose face like the first orphaned

poem I daily turn exactly

oblique to.