Seven Hours

One hour.

I hand in the few lines of my dissertation

that my hunger traced over,

then embroil myself in the open air

reddening with the foul slap of twilight.

For the entire day I have been wishing

to stand on this street corner,

fraternizing with traffic.

I am not yet scared, only disappointed.

Two hours.

The bus came late,

so on a stomach thorned with dinner withdrawals

I crash through the apartment door and help myself.

I speak of a joy that buttered me up at noontime

but whose clock is now ticking like an admonitory finger.

Three hours.

Finally the night has hit puberty and sprouts dark tufts

on its chest,

but my lamplight, like a playground bully,

shakes the change loose from it until it yellows with dread.

My galavanting fatigues me.

A bystander, I turn the other cheek

to the cool side of the pillow.

Four hours.

On my birthday I decided to start showering at night

to give myself a break from watching the moon

clip its fingernails in the sky.

The showerhead nearly lulls me to sleep,

as if my hand were lapping up warm sink water

at a six a.m. high school wakeup call.

Five hours.

Nausea

and my denial of carbon’s adverse effects

in the long term.

My roommate puts on his favourite movie,

and I haul my duvet towards the living room

so that my bed, too, can experience the nudity I did

an hour ago,

and on Saturday when our fingers were drunk with skin.

Not my roommate,

rather someone I heard from before twilight

drank itself to violence.

Six hours.

I attempt to describe his movement to my roommate

and find only the word otter.

He has brown hair and a familiar way of blinking.

He is a comfort to touch,

and I would like to come back soon to the apartment

with the irate bathroom fan and crown moulding—

not to sleep with him,

just to fold his t-shirt in the morning.

Seven hours.

Tears hammer under my skin like cysts

while I should be communing with sleep.

Searching high and low for catharsis, I think of my grief.

Kat Mulligan is a Virginia-born, Montreal-based student and writer. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Birch Journal, yolk literary, Cactus Press, and orangepeel, among others.