Sam Preminger: An Aubade Is an Awful Ocean
Adrian via Unsplash
an aubade is an awful ocean
an hour before work
I start from a dream
searching for someone in the sheets;
not the sort of person
who’s embarrassed by a swing set,
not a large blue butterfly so
terribly difficult to love up close.
I keep pretending she’s in the hallway,
dreamcatchers diminishing
the morning to a hum; vibrations
of wood on her naked feet.
outside, it wasn’t quiet, but polite
only, it never happens like that.
In which she describes the ocean to a blind man
a voice from the 50’s / deserving
cold / an august morning after
january night / heavy song / fraying rope / the storm
a whole town remembers / hands
on old iron / what you
left behind / drowning, only imagine it
painless /a foreign country / a foreign
war / our grandfathers, every one, their terrible
mass / repetition and wrath / one cold sip
of water gone down the wrong pipe
A wider window
Ryan is only eight years old, standing in the hallway of a hospital. Ryan’s baby sister has just been born and, as he looks through the nursery window, he realizes he doesn’t know which of the infants is her. To be safe, he decides he will love them all and, as he decides this, he wonders if he can.
Editor's Note: This article has been republished from our new site.
Sam Preminger is a trans-nonbinary, Jewish writer and publisher. They hold an MFA from Pacific University and serve as the Editor-in-Chief of NAILED Magazine. You can find their poetry in North Dakota Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative, Split Lip, and Yes Poetry, among other publications. Their chapbook, Cosmological Horizons, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (Summer 2022). They live in Portland, OR, where they've acquired too many house plants.
