Minnie Bruce Pratt 2.20.12 photo by Leslie Feinberg
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Getting Through the Night
At twilight, in the fold of this day’s pall,
you lift the bed covers up, and I climb in.
The bed is a cave, the sheets cool as stone.
The bed is a nest we fold flesh into, belly
to back, knee to knee-fold, wrist-bone to hand.
Our ribs brace the bed, a boat to carry us into,
through, the little death that lives in every night.
I wake again at three a.m. Our cardboard boxes
sit unpacked in every room. Taxes, losses, old
dishes, death. But you still breathe beside me.
If I can put each thing into its place, there will be
a place for the boat to land where the clock
doesn’t tick, where the body is unlocked from pain,
where the wood thrush sings again after the rain.
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Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poetry on being a lesbian mother, Crime Against Nature, was honored with the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book is Magnified, poems emerging from her life with trans activist and writer Leslie Feinberg. Her creative nonfiction essay, “The Queer South: Where the Past Is Not Past and the Future is Now,” was recently published in Scalawag. More information on her work can be found here.
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Mary Pratt, The Bed, 1968
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Author: Terence Winch
