Night Bloom

Michaela Kotziers

Streetlights dip the moon
in silver iodide, the sky
a negative wash weaving
across walls of a new room.

Your voice settles like a moth
in my sheets,
gray-peppered wings dusting
limp smiles of telephone wires
that run north to south.

 In August, you swore
those wires would pull me back.

But under every dream-held moon,
their copper frays
in pools of suspended air,
           they sink
into muggy cotton fields
as seeds fill my throat.

I wake up dry-mouthed.
You bloom with the thought of heat.

Bio
Michaela Kotziers is a senior studying English Literature and German at Penn.