The checkpoint is midnight, I will write of how,
a few years back, we had dropped that noun in our soup
the one that stripped Cinderella down, I will write of dreaming up childhood
in a hundred square feet; of fresh cucumbers on sale,
the bitter taste we swam in
as if it would feed us summer

You are passing me the sour cream, the green submerging in the chill,
our first cucumbers after the war, I can only remember that much
You are telling me that I used to be chatty and insatiable,
that I’d never known how to say thank you or to stop,
that with our hunger for fresh vegetables
we had shrunken the night and sat in its lap like kittens

My fears were always evenly coated in lime,
the consuming, silenced sinking holes
All the darkness I carried in my hair was falling into meals;
you didn’t know how to brush it, how to squeeze it out
and for years I had thought the bottom was near,
it had always been an endless fall

Lately, before I fall asleep
that sea we once got to meet
engulfs me
The dolphins on my swimsuit can eat
any malevolent gaze from the depths
I’m terrified knowing
the shore is too far off,
I am a dot amid the blue,
and I’ll never fend off
the vast space

Sometimes before the poem begins
I’m still drifting at the wet darkness
that could easily
be any chunk of midnight
in which it is easy to trick hunger,
though I never gave up
trying
to push myself
against nothing at all