by Pamela Manasco
Lately I feel it like a branch in autumn overrun
with brown leaves, too dry, rasping down my back.
Only at night, I remind her, when I'm trying to sleep.
This is not a thing my husband understands. When he puts
his head on the pillow he goes. Maybe you have
to be good on the inside to sleep like that. Maybe
this month something breaks we can't afford to fix. I need
to note this in the gray book I use to log my problems.
Maybe it means something that when my therapist asks
how have you been, I start with the good before I tell her
the bad. Like how I swam in the ocean although I feared
stepping on sharp objects I couldn't see, how when I woke
breathing fast through the panic attack, I walked the floors
by myself, and even at that late hour the house
across the street had its lights on and a body making shadows,
and the teenager who lives two doors down drove his old car
very slowly down the street to his driveway, enough to believe
the three of us could open our doors at the same time. That's something.
Pamela Manasco is a poet and English instructor at Alabama A&M University. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, SWWIM, Lunch Ticket, The Midwest Quarterly, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Alabama with her family. You can find her on Bluesky @pamelamanasco, and via her website: https://pamelamanasco.com.
