Night

 

 
 
 

I live in a house that loves me.

—bell hooks

 

I drive through a forest at night. The trees offer their hands, like dancing partners. I want to say yes, but monogamy pulls me home. That shared solitude makes the bed with flannel grocery lists in the winter and in the summer, sheets that sail along lantern-lit coastlines. The moon tonight swears it’s never been to a party. With the pride of a hermit refusing post-Iron Age technology, the moon face-washes with the rags of tree leaves before going to bed. Outside the forest a village claims—and I believe—it too has never been to a party. Maybe someday someone will give the houses new dresses and play the fiddle for them. Looking for home in the somber basement of the day, I tell my pyjamas it won’t be long now. But so far away they can’t hear me.

 
 
 

Landon Godfrey is the author of Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review, 2011), selected by David St. John for the Cider Press Book Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, The Adroit Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Verse Daily, and other places. Also an artist, she is a designer, printer, and editor at the letterpress postcard-broadside journal Croquet.