Luminous

Jacob Fraser-Gilbert

The rain tapped my windowsill,

“Hey, you awake in there?”

I wasn’t.

He shrugged and turned away.

I slept soundly and was filled

with clutter uncluttering itself.

Papers reshuffled,

Memories reimagined,

Images unremembered.

At some point in the night,

amongst this untangling,

a word had hatched in my mouth.

It had a bulbous syllable belly,

a beak of swooshing phonetics,

and a tail of untameable poetics.

In the morning, I yawned

and it fell to the floor in front of me.

Its big, watery eyes reminded me

of a moon, refracted through drops

of rain clung to one’s eyelashes.