Emily Pérez

I do not want appointments

curving the calendar
like a marble on that blanket
of space-time, causing dimples
in the duvet

I do not want the future’s
siren bleating from the barnyard
in the background, thumping
from the souped-up Honda’s
amp

just give me a nap
a sealed off silence in these sheets
without a man or child, mineral
or animal

no phone announcing
what I missed
no tail to flog my forehead
tongue up my nostril
brusque check of my vitals
no ball of fight that needs untangling
no lecture on the library
of Alexandria and what was lost
to fire, no fire,
no smoke or steam,
no fullness of grief

just sleep,
that other hole
in the fabric of undoing

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Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize and finalist for a Colorado Book Award; House of Sugar, House of Stone and two chapbooks. She co-edited the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, also a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, her work has appeared in The Guardian, LARB, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review and Poetry. She teaches high school in Denver, where she lives with her family.