and then, when you look around you
and everything’s colored like khaki,
when you’re swimming in tapioca
and calling it motion, you look up
and everything looks like an off-white
ceiling with a bulb that’s been broken
since june and you don’t have it in you
to get up and turn on the lamp, who
do you call out for in your nightmares?
what else is there to hollow out and
keep under your pillow? when the
door to the fire escape stays open
who do you blame when you burn?
Katherine Martini is a first-year MFA candidate at Rutgers–Newark who is just trying to prove that there is a difference between a Master’s in Poetry and a degree in Broken Childhood Dreams.
