some mornings (nubs)

Some mornings, waking up is harder than you’d think
 
 
Trapped, heavy
under red  patchwork
quilt
 
with downy feathers
clawing my skin,
my arms end in mere nubs,
handless.
 
I feel the weight of the
dust motes spiraling in
a sunlit column from the window,
 
chasing each other endlessly
and hammering against
my temples, thudding in my ears, a
 
pulsing thrum
of life and vitality and inevitability but
I can’t brush them off, because
 
in the place where fingers ought
to be there are only
rounded ends, fleshy like
 
a mole rat’s nose, protruding from my
sleeve cuffs, sniffing against the
darkness in the sheets.
 
Smells like an evasion,
and an overdeveloped sense of
righteous sloth, my wrists report.
Sir.
 
Maybe if there was someone
else here, they hint.
It would be easier.
 
Shut up, I say. You’re nubs.
 
I can tangle here by myself as
long as I want. 



january 2011, copyright sarah hirsch