At 6:28 a.m. I am crossing the street where I live, and the stray cats are out. They stop dead in their tracks, their stare fixed on me. Their eyes are starving.

Inside, there is an exquisite corpse asleep in my bed. I brought it home two nights ago after pulling the empty drowned sack of flesh out of Lake Michigan, a sliver of the moonlight reflecting off its grin. I held it in my arms, sopping, sobbing, trying to breathe life into it. Instead it breathed into me, forced something down my throat with its last death rattle, and instead of being left with a bad taste in my mouth, I was left with something new.

The people on the bus this early are not the ones you'd expect. I wonder where all these aged ghosts are going at this hour. We're all vexed; we've been tossed about as waves -- but the truth is we're all the same. We're just the foam being shifted across the surface of the water. We eye one another, waiting for one of us to starve to death, waiting for one of us to doze off, so that we can finally be reminded that we are alive, we are living, and there will be time to sleep once it's over.

09/27/2009

Author's Note: Prose poem.

Posted on 09/27/2009
Copyright © 2010 Stephanie Lane Sutton