Delivery

Sara Michas-Martin

If you don’t like your sleep you can change the channel you can assign it a number drip wine into the cracks weight it with tablets an old bed grows heavy with irretrievable thoughts topographies of salt it bows when lifted the men next door slide a new mattress out like a file of blank paper the truck is royal blue with one door closed it reads best sleep world without naming the cost I bought a queen bed at an estate sale once where people ants at a picnic streamed out of the house with the belongings of a young woman who had a good job I chose a skirt and blazer from her closet she might have died her shoes were for sale and Windex nice luggage but there was no sadness attached to anything that I could feel sensitive as I am I’ve kept the bed for years a public park now in the spare country of dreams where sometimes I go to change the way I relate to my lower back or maybe my life

Sara Michas-Martin is a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford and author of Gray Matter, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize. Recent poems and essays can be found in the American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Los Angeles Review and on Terrain.org.