Jeremy Rock

Dreams in Which I’m the Lighting

Out in the woods, safely hours
before dusk, hearing the waking

groan of something that couldn’t be
a truck, not so deep an oily rumble.

Greener. Slick like a cave mouth just
as the day’s last shots graze its moss.

At a roaring party’s edge, pleading
with the purple window lights netted over

opposite skyscrapers that I could feel
so wrapped in their glow, the sound behind

me would melt to gray noise, diffused
where the rooms shine and I am full.

The days I laid in a rented bed, listening
to my heartbeat in my ear; those walls’ faded

paper unsticking from sheetrock, washed-out
sepia bleeding through. I’m a golden hour drip

now, amaretto tongue—the gentle sting in your iris
            when you’re so happy you could cry.

Port floods strobing the pier like the rising
bridge on a cruise liner. Soft-haloed after-hours

parking decks wreathing railways in liminal white.
I’m how the low red from a minivan’s brakes shards

the dark for a pre-dawn drive. The highway cameras
            love every mote of dust I kick up.

            Gray. Industrial. Dull chrome pipes
going nowhere. I want to say I love the machine

I’ve become, this acid-rained concrete tight-lipped
as a beartrap. I want to say I’m breathing. Wharfs,

docks, some vacant outskirt. I’ve got the metal
            throat of a tin can peeled out into wire. 

            Waking—not the act, but the pale blues
and yellows. The birdsong. I’m the curtain’s mercy

letting sun knock but not enter. I can never watch
late morning fade to noon, but I know the rhythm:

talking through the wall, running water, and finally,
            finally, tomorrow’s finally here.

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Jeremy Rock is pursuing an MFA at the University of Alabama. He has work published in Poet Lore, Ninth Letter, Sugar House Review, Flyway and elsewhere. He’s usually wandering back roads with a camera. You can find him @jeremy__rock