By: Chloe Ford
Midnight
Winter’s eve. Wind haunts
the eaves invisible somewhere
beyond my black bedroom
window. Each piece of furniture,
tonight, a specter: encroaching and
hungry. Each breath stings
of the time before breath, the inevitable
return. I wait for my mother’s
headlights to stroke the frozen
driveway like a hand across
a troubled forehead. Each gust
mimics the sound of her arrival,
but falls short–
her absence crashes against
my rigid ribs. I nudge the cat
asleep at the foot of the bed,
half expect her to be stone.
And
I slip a finger into my-
self, spine curved cryptic as the word
queer. The grass beneath me forgives, though I didn’t
ask. I probe the question there. I stir
the flood—free and fertile and direction-
less. Cars screech vertical down the narrow road one way,
one way, but I’m all kinds of spreading
secret.
I’ll let the wordless animal in the wood watch
my walls melt, hip-lift away from too much
angular architecture. Don’t fence me. Imagine
multitude, multi-
dimensional desire, always doubling and suspended
in possibility like a tossed coin. Shelter
the yearn for a star’s white hard shoot through night’s cave and
for the luminous circle of the moon like a heavenward hole.
The simultaneity. Nothing’s a lie.
My desire doesn’t die, doesn’t kill. It births and
it births, and I’m borne and I’m born. I’m tonguing
the horizon, and I’m lung-ing the horizon
as the plural air swarms, as the woodpecker’s
thousand feathers thrust and
blur, chip away at a stubborn trunk
to reveal the fluid underneath.
Chloe Ford has been crafting poems since she learned to write. She currently resides in Portland, Maine and is pursuing a master's degree in Library and Information Science so she can support youth in their exploration of written language. Her poetry has been published in a few small journals.