wildscape. literary journal

Featured Poet of Issue 6 – Read Interview Here!

What Sleeps with Its Fist Uncurled
by Veronica Tucker

Your hand is open in sleep,
as if you have finally decided
the world will not take from you tonight.

Your breath lifts my shirt
and sets it back down.
The room holds.

Downstairs, the refrigerator hums.
The dogs have arranged themselves
like punctuation around the couch.

You are warm in that specific way
only children are, a small sun
gathered into a single body.

I think about how often I tell people
to rest, how rarely it is possible.

In the emergency department,
we tape arms to boards,
tie gowns in knots that do not hold,
write stable in charts like a word
we are afraid to say out loud.

Here, your pulse is a bird
I could cup in both hands.

You have unlearned the need
to be ready.

Your fingers, for once,
are not practicing how to hold on.

about the author // Veronica Tucker