Night has bought me a narrative yet again,
like a miser who thought the stars were
too far into space for effort, pacifying
by the defense they have been bent in body
and their backs no longer supple for acrobatics,
and fortune has been sucked out of their stalk
as if with wide-rimmed straws, thus, these
palm-stained pages of endless prescriptions
of tactics to combat the absence of sleep;
yet the hour grows like a gong released
into space where gravity transports it easefully,
and below floats an isle broken from its root
where the stars hook around the edges,
biting off from the story what has scabbed.

# # #

Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Over 300 of her poems appear in a variety of literary venues both print and online including several anthologies by different presses. Her work is upcoming in Qu Literary Journal, First Literary Review – East, The Seventh Quarry, The Dark Ones Anthology by Bibliotheca Alexandrina and Emergence Anthology by Kind of a Hurricane Press. She edits poetry for eFiction India. http://sheikha82.wordpress.com

Photo credit: Terri Malone