the peep-peeping is coming closer now, brimming
up in my brain and pulling me
out of sleep

supine in
rustling darkness i shift awake
alicia’s breath and eyelashes

painting tiny strokes on my cheek in
time with stalks of grass and rainfly and
summer bugs that have noises but not names

we are older than we’ve ever been
we are younger than our sometime selves
we are testing places that we’ve been before

and every one is new

categories flit apart, pause, recongregate,
vertebrates suckling at a watering hole:
Equus quagga, C. taurinus, Me and You

we are not shaken awake, here on this tilting plane
but sidled, slowly, into being
thises and thats with mesh and zipper boundaries

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