The Legacy of Our Sister-Sleep

The moon, Sister, bright disc upon which
we spent our wishes, has reset itself to zero.

Nothing now but an empty dish in the flat,
black night, and we are left to sleep in fits,

as we did in that wild room of our youth,
woken by creak and snap, the machinery

of shadows, a juvenile oak standing
sentinel outside our screened window.

Your breath was my barometer. I drifted
in its steady current, tensed at its quickening.

Tonight we rest a thousand miles apart,
exchange quick texts in the dark to wrestle

the madness of our father’s mind, these words
no surrogate for your hand reaching across

that dark space.

---

Sandy Longhorn has received the Porter Fund Literary Prize for Arkansas authors and the Collins Prize from the Birmingham Poetry Review. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Alchemy of My Mortal Form. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches at the University of Central Arkansas, where she directs the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference.