Poetry Magazine
The Last Time I Slept in This Bed
I was involved in the serious business
of ripping apart my own body.
I’d run my fingers over it,
seeking but never finding
the right point of entry,
so having to tear one myself,
though midway through
I’d always tire,
and let night enter
like a silver needle,
sewing my eyelids shut.
This was not an original practice,
but thinking, for a time, that it was
felt like being able to choose
when spring would arrive:
engineering an April
that opened like a parasol,
even in thoroughest winter.
Source: Poetry (February 2013).
Biography
Sara Peters was born in Nova Scotia and was a 2010–2012 Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her first book, 1996, will be published in April by House of Anansi Press.
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Living, Life Choices, The Body, The Mind, Social Commentaries, Gender & Sexuality
Poetic Terms Couplet, Free Verse
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