Emily Brisse

So it's spring, and I'm out walking again, today in the middle of the big city, trains rattling west, airplanes overhead, highway noise rumbling on two sides, glimpses of 35W through the ten-foot high still-standing grasses, but: the still-standing grasses swaying ten feet high, the robins with their scraggly nests and cautiousness, the deer paths, the boggy soil, dirt black as night, a new word ( fen ),  the Mississippi past the sedge line , the (I think) common sootywing butterfly that looks neither sooty nor common to these color-starved eyes, which is to say nothing for the green the green the green the green the green.

Your husband is sleeping. You hear his deep, regular breaths, feel the warmth of his fingers next to yours under the blankets. You do not have to look to know the contours of his face at rest in the dark. You turn onto your side, pull your knees up closer to your chest. Flex your toes. When you get up, you do so quietly, so as not to wake him, and tiptoe out, stepping into the cold of other rooms. You check your phone: 3:07 a.m. For a while you stand at the window, listening to the wind, watching it move the shadowed branches in the grove, thinking. When you pad back through the house--eyes heavy now, decisions put off until morning--the stove clock blinks 2:36, and you accept this like any dream's incongruence. It is only later, that morning, that the two of you realize it is Daylight Savings, and that you were awake in the strange moments when in some parts of the house it was one hour and in others it was sixty minutes before. You wonder how you managed to float so easily be...