Dorsey Craft

NICU

Time piles on
our shoulders—
frigid drift,
slow pulse,
frozen veins.
They stick
and stick you,
their needles
beak-thin. You
swell. Less
stimulus they say.
He needs rest.
Monitors trill
electric. I am
ancient—
shark-mottled
under ice, a listless,
gasping, mindless
thing that chases
the deepest,
bluest pain.

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Dorsey Craft is the author of Plunder (Bauhan Publishing 2020), which was the winner of the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of North Florida, serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Agni and co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series with Jessica Q. Stark in Jacksonville, FL.