It’s Like This Every Night
By Sally Rosen Kindred
Featured Art: “Acequia” by Mateo Galvano
Waiting for the elevator, you hear
the dark floors chime, you
hand over her pocketbook
and put on your gloves, you try
to convince her to get on
when it comes. You’re with me,
you say, and this is the only way
to get down to the ground.
She doesn’t believe you,
probably because this
is not her blue coat and she knows
she is dead, which you’d know too
if you’d just wake up.
But you go on sleeping
like the fool
you are, folding your body
close to itself under
the heavy sheets, your hand
touching your own
sleeve, understanding
it’s hers, waiting for the doors
to open, waiting
quietly, like she taught you,
to go down and out the lobby
together into the
blue-white city
to see the snow.
Sally Rosen Kindred’s third book is Where the Wolf (2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Julie Suk Award. She is also the author of Book of Asters and No Eden, as well as three chapbooks. She received two poetry awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Image Journal, Shenandoah, and Pleiades. She teaches online at The Poetry Barn.
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