10,000 Lakes
BY CARRIE RUDZINSKI
In the miles from your headboard
to your balcony doors
I have spent an entire morning
tracing the sound of you arriving home
across your ceiling.
There is no silence like yours.
It shakes through me
like the blessing of a new apartment;
the anticipation of surviving the night
to discover you in the morning.
In the morning
I watch God paint with his left hand
across an empty sky.
I count seven hundred fish scales
shivering in the breeze,
shaking out my old names,
calling you back to sleep.
They sound like a tired kitchen floor,
this choir, this praise under our feet.
They sound like your chest –
an acre of flight –
crashing into my hands,
wailing,
we’re lost, we’re lost,
we’re lost again at sea.
In the miles from your headboard
to your balcony doors
I have spent an entire morning
tracing the sound of you arriving home
across your ceiling.
There is no silence like yours.
It shakes through me
like the blessing of a new apartment;
the anticipation of surviving the night
to discover you in the morning.
In the morning
I watch God paint with his left hand
across an empty sky.
I count seven hundred fish scales
shivering in the breeze,
shaking out my old names,
calling you back to sleep.
They sound like a tired kitchen floor,
this choir, this praise under our feet.
They sound like your chest –
an acre of flight –
crashing into my hands,
wailing,
we’re lost, we’re lost,
we’re lost again at sea.
CARRIE RUDZINSKI is the type of girl boys take to a cemetery on their first date. In her life as a performance poet, she has toured coast to coast, co-founded a weekly reading series at Emerson College, and was named "Best Female Poet" at the 2008 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. In 2010, she represented the Boston Cantab at the Individual World Poetry Slam and at the National Poetry Slam, where her team finished in Semi-Finals.