ELEVEN-THIRTY P.M.
Inspired by Wislawa Szymborska’s “Four in the Morning”
For some it’s post-night time news time.
For some it’s the start of late-night comedy hours.
For some it’s night-shift lunchtime.
But for me it’s the middle of the night.
Digital clock numbers glow, mocking me with thirty minutes yet to go;
I’ve already rested at least two hours abed; and
the longer I lie still, the faster my mind spins.
The hour creeps from this point forward, slowly slipping toward
midnight in a reverse-race between fluttering eyelids and
numbers changing shape—timing how long it takes to fall asleep and
how much longer I have before I rise at five seems perverse, but that’s what I do.
Eleven-thirty at night is a time of expectation and anticipation—
whether others remain awake or I try to drift off, and
whether they move on to do more or I manage to succeed in dreaming. . . .
ORIENTATION
It’s a game I
haven’t played in a while
but, like so much from the past, suspect
my grownup experience would prove far different
from the childhood game:
Tie a blindfold on me and
take me by the shoulders and
twirl me around;
I’ll bet that when you
slide the cloth off my
closed eyes, I won’t know
which way is up and which is down,
not to mention east, west, north, south—
more than silly dizziness, it’ll
create disorientation,
a sensation
I pointedly avoid
in adulthood.
I’ll be lost on more than just
a compass; I’ll also be lost
in latitude and longitude, likewise
in where I belong between global time zones.
Did the twirling speed me
up—or only slow me
down once I stopped?
And what of the relationship (if any)
between the velocity of Earth’s spin
on its axis
and my spin, which landed me
on my . . . axis?
Then, too, what
of perception
of place,
of time,
of how
I fit into space?
I might be tempted
to ask these questions
once I’m done;
they’d reflect the concerns
of someone now mostly focused on
seriousness, who struggles to let loose
with unthinking youthful abandon;
but for now, as long as I have hope
of regaining my former sense of adventure,
I’m going to tell you:
Direct me
to the blindfold,
please.
TIME OUT OF MIND
Do you remember when . . . ?
we ask each other,
then search our
memories that we imagine are
compartmentalized like organized shelves, or file drawers
subdivided into neatly labeled manila folders.
Do you recall that time . . . ?
We mentally thumb through the
general classifications, topic by topic,
decade by decade, occasionally day by day, and
try to envision the unfilmed photos and movies
running in our brains.
Can we truly contain the time,
however much we believe we’ve
captured it in a physical picture,
though, even if we have that apparent proof?
Does the image evoke the same
feelings each person photographed had back then?
Or does each one now peer into a mirror
and envisage a completely different human
being than they once were—
more mature,
more developed than any negative
that might have once been part of their character?
Margaret Adams Birth is the author of Borderlands (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in more than 50 journals including Plainsongs, Chantarelle’s Notebook, Aldebaran, BlazeVOX, White Wall Review (Canada), Blue Lake Review, and Awakened Voices. She has published short stories and novellas (some of them written under the pen names Maggie Adams and Rhett Shepard), short nonfiction, and even a few comic books, as well. She is a native North Carolinian who has also lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, upstate New York, southern California, a rain forest on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, and now New York City. You can find her online at https://www.facebook.com/MaggieAdamsRhettShepard.
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