Weekend Visit
I wake to see your feet next to my head,
the slow ascent into day made miraculous
with the gentle whirring of your leg hair
as you curve, your shoulders to my shins, under the cover.
The bird feeder you hand-painted swings empty
through the window, swallow after discontented swallow
landing, fretting, darting away. It is 11am. We slept
like children, which is to say we fought sleep
in the aurora of the other’s fallen eyelashes, oscillated
and mythologised and warmed the air until
the words slowed their flutter in our yawning mouths.
You said see you tomorrow and I stayed awake
enwreathed in the silent, shrinking hours, tomorrow
already flung from the nest. I watched you sleep
for a while. I noticed the ringlet stuck to your bottom lip,
the one sock that stayed on through the night,
the other limp and solemn on the floor. Soon I will
wrestle my bag into the back of a taxi and go back
to remembering you. The sparrows, while not migratory birds,
could make their homes in any firmer treetop
yet choose to stay.
Em Humphries is a teacher and writer, currently teaching and writing in London. She is the recipient of the Valeria Dean Burgess Stevens Prize for writing on women and gender, and her work appears in Impossible Archetype, Doghouse Press, and Eyeflash Poetry.