This Other Bed

like a winter garden under snow, beckons. Missing your body’s exhausting business. Forgive if I succumb to its crisp-white invitation, its anonymous enfoldings. At home you sleep, our girl in the other room. I imagine you dreaming deeply of apples, the day’s adventures fluttering under your eyelids like moths. My pristine loneliness I’ll try to cure. From this bed, I will the pillow next to you to tuck itself between your legs, supporting your hips. Remember my pregnant belly like a swell of sea rising under all that covered us? Remember my craving for apples? How hot I ran, how I couldn’t get enough of you? I may toss here all night, undreaming in these furling sheets, come morning strip the bed, haul my snowy trains across the earth to see you.

After a successful 20-year career as a regional theater actor, Elisabeth Adwin Edwards has shifted her focus to poetry; her work has appeared in ASKEW and Poeticdiversity. She now lives full-time in Los Angeles with her artist-husband, nine-year-old daughter and a tarantula. You can email her at inspmorsecode@earthlink.net.