Bedroom + Curtain

I keep thinking about the curtains in my bedroom window growing up. I’d be awake late, the summer air finally cooling and the thing curtains would whip up into the room. Bigger than I remember, like they might fill the entire room in a shroud. Sometimes they would snap back, cracking in the relief the breeze brought into my room. The ebb and flow of the night always made me feel the itch of possibility. I wouldn’t learn the word liminal until the malls started to close. What felt possible wasn’t earthly but fantastical. Could I walk on air, vampire are real, someone out there between the stars is looking back at me at this exact moment. Hearing the tractor trailers rushing along the freeway next to the house always made escape feel imminent.

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Through the window, all night long
the summer breeze beckons,
come sleep come sleep,
yet the curtain says no
snapping back at me, cracking
away the sands of slumber
if I could only grab you
pull you from my bedroom
out into the open summer air
what would you say to such freedom
could I cling to your thin gray threading
would I find the breeze different outside
or only bigger shadows even more shrouded