UNFINISHED OCEAN
I was a mother in the snow, crumpled
under a black coat next to the ocean. That winter I lost
seven hundred hours of sleep. God declined
frost on the pines. I fell down the staircase,
turned two ages
I stopped being sick a long time ago.
But your illnesses are just beginning,
in the paper basket where you sleep
Your fever bores me—I dream a thin horse
got by the old gray waves
You are too small. You could drown
in an inch of storm-water the color of your eye
My heart beats much slower than yours. Everything but
the snow and my brother has disappeared.
I used his name for you so I could
sleep on his floor. He’s smaller than an hour a month.
When I die, I see him walking
clearly into the unfinished ocean, and even though I love you, I go with him.
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THE MIDDLE HOUSE
Mornings we walk to the edge of the island and it starts to snow
The cells you left in my brain fall around like shaved ice,
a song my mother sang in pieces
I still haven’t decided if I will leave you
Winter doesn’t give up—it lengthens darkness,
your legs grow up against it
The ice glitters in my sleep, showering so hard I cannot wake
On the day we are supposed to leave the island,
I wait for a cry to come out of a hole in the ice
We run from the hospital each morning and it starts to snow
the same snow from an unusually painful winter a million years ago
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JULIA ANNA MORRISON is a poet from Alpharetta, Georgia. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2014 her manuscript was a finalist for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and she was a Yaddo Residency Fellow. Julia lives in Iowa City where she teaches at the University of Iowa and co-edits Two Peach with Catherine Pond.
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Read more by Julia Anna Morrison
Poem in Phantom
Two poems in The Journal, one here and another here