Day and Night Keep Role-Reversing
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
Four in the morning yesterday. I stood at the balcony, somewhere in Venice, looking for the stars. Everything turned so black, I stared at nothing: it could’ve been the gondolier, or a piazza, or the abyss. With the sunrise, fog filmed everything in its white, like smoke, like something was on fire. I said to myself, this may be my life.
Two in the morning today. My stroke and I don’t sleep well together. We can’t sleep apart. My bed is narrow, but it feels too empty. This is my life, I tell myself. Months, decades from now. Who will answer the baby monitor beside you, asks my heart, who is cruel to me at night. And I think of the scattered days when I might just almost have it together, and the calm I find there. I am alive, I think, as I shut my eyes. This is my life.
Five in the morning today. I listened to a Madonna song I’ve forgotten. I bounced my heel and closed my eyes, and then I was dancing, well, bobbing one leg, scanning the words straight into my body. I said to myself, I could give in another try; this could be my life. I told myself, yes, it would take day’s and night’s work. And crying. Dad’s humming to Gershwin. The compulsory stroke that keeps threatening my breath. Without a doubt. But this could be my life.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Poetry | Back to Volume 19, Issue 1 – Summer 2025
Scaling the Ladder into Starlight
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
A thousand acres ago
when I was a daisy-crowned girl
on a wraparound veranda with four
loungers and it was hopscotched streets
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the grass at dusk,
wildflowers wilting under me,
the coming constellations blanketing me,
the library window a chimney
of loosening daylight,
my mom’s lamplit window,
a half-shut eye wanting sleep,
and the panels of the house
were even and polished as dew
and likely a hundred honeysuckles
waited in their trimmed rows
as the bees buzzed in their choir
and I, in my brand-new body,
with its Target tags and periwinkle socks,
confided in silence wearing its ballet shoes,
the stars with their legs singing,
and thought of the man in the moon with his giant key
that opens a door
to the thousand acres
up there—
a kitchen of clouds
to ladders that reach
the fading yellow and acrylic light,
ankles, stomachs, dreams, soundly sleeping
safe in the shallow end of night.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Poetry | Back to Volume 19, Issue 1 – Summer 2025
About the Author
Elaine Miriam’s work has been published in Sky Island Journal, The Amsterdam Review, Panoplyzine, and many others. She has been nominated for the 2025 Best New Poets Anthology and the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.