The Wake

Pink skirts shouldn’t walk
by themselves past nine.

Street lamps stretch
a gray mirror more
breakable than the sun’s.

Darkness released. Miasmic
in the air, I suck it up my nostrils.
It pools
above my lower eyelids

unblinkable. Men swirl like steam
out of my peripheral.
The mass of them suddenly
a solid contradiction
of my softness.

The shake of rabbit
eyes quake down my curved back
until I escape across
the last three cracks.

Lights flood him
from behind, he waits
for me in the door.
Gallant arm bridging it open.

Fluorescent medicine
untangles my unease,
but I never forget that he’s bigger.