Aubade Between Homes

Ellene Glenn Moore

And now I am awake before the sun, 
convinced of a bedbug infestation in this daub townhome 
that is identical to a million others—to 177 others, 
for now I am counting the rows and the grids and groupings 
instead of piling dishes that are not ours 
into a dishwasher that shudders its way out from underneath the counter—
and now the sun doesn’t wake at all, so I keep time 
tallying not ours not ours not ours, 
struggling not to sink into apathy.
The broken wine glass not ours, the clementine carpet not ours, 
the urine-anointed laminate not ours. How easy it has become 
to cast these things off, the abjuration of authorship 
its own kind of oath, not a liberation so much as a further extinguishing 
of identity, even the lovely rain 
sputtering out beneath the crush of the air conditioner 
which we keep at 64 degrees to make at least the bedroom livable 
in this fug of rootlessness. Darling—
Get up. The sun
is somewhere, and I want
so much, 
but I will settle for stripping 
these sheets from the bed.