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.