ALERT

Night sweats, sweat between my breasts;

the sheet slick, my mind

a mattress left out and pecked open,

stripped of its stuffing

by magpies battening their nest

high in the courtyard’s cottonwood.

2 A.M., 3 A.M., 4,

Don’t miss the bus, don’t miss the bus,

my father talmudically warns

from beyond his freshly tamped grave

as an owl’s twin searchbeams

exhume the dark. The nightly raid

begins with a series of hoots.

The sheets are soaked. The heart

I gave you, the one currently

confined in me, fibrillates

non-stop like a tin spoon

banged between iron bars,

self-celebration morphing

into solitary panicked protest

in shadow of the owl’s launch.