2019 Christine Prose Poetry Award winner
HAIBUN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
AMANDA MOORE
AMANDA MOORE
Though she knows better the girl still says nightmere a relic of early language when she also said fleamingos and girled cheese. Nightmere as if to belittle: merely at night, merely a vision and not some charging mare galloping through dreams to tear and divot the fragile terrain of sleep. She holds onto this verbal tic and I my mother’s ear, which hears her steps outside our room past 2 am, her tall 13-year-old body filling the doorframe and a whimper of explanation: nightmere. And so she log rolls between us stiff at first, no longer familiar with the sensation of family bed, sleeping between the two bodies that made hers. Soon she curls toward fetal, her body’s twitches a metronome to better dreams, her mind shifting to work that can’t be done in the waking world and she rolls toward me, slings an arm around my waist and sighs.
How rare these days to
be her comfort—I can’t sleep
from such delight.
How rare these days to
be her comfort—I can’t sleep
from such delight.
Amanda Moore's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Best New Poets, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and she is the recipient of writing awards from The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. A high school English teacher, Amanda lives by the beach with her husband and daughter in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. More about her work is available at http://amandapmoore.com.
