In the night I fell from bed
and my stomach had grown
voracious in the hour since
the neighbor’s eye had gone too blind
to cast an appraising stare
this way. I made a waking prayer
and took a loaf of bread.
The bread in the icebox
was hard like a stone,
but there was bread enough for
one thousand hungry mouths
if mine were not the biggest
mouth of the lot.
I tossed the crustier ends by
the window to a quiet street,
a tin-can alley grown old
too young by virtue of its graying parts.
The wind was chilly so
I shut the window on the breeze.
In my room I shut the cupboard doors
and shut the cupboard mirror,
for I had no ribs to see or count.
I dirtied the floor with pieces of bread
and reasoned that I would not be immaculate
then and felt more tired than before.
I was tired so I took a book
of love poems from the shelf
and read until I did not forget
that I was awake in the night
after falling from bed
and my eye was too blind to see
even the most salient thing
and the bread sat like a rock
in the salt of my stomach
and I ungenerously slept on it all.