Last night I dreamt the wall
showed through my mother’s nightgown.
I was once small and wholly
held, though my hair caught
in the nails of her rocking chair.
She let me be impatient with picture books.
At the end I heard her heart beg
sleep, sleep. Most nights I beg sleep, sleep.
In some dreams she cannot speak,
or else I cry too loud to hear,
and the wall congeals.
This is a world without.
Her death is a daily congealing.
Mercy nailed her suffering to a tree,
though I still want the spring
unshattered, her heart re-beating.
Born and raised in the rural Finger Lakes of Upstate New York, Piety Exley is a poet, a graduate of Bennington College, and works in libraries. Her work consistently toils with daughterhood, water, and bodies, as well as the conjunction of all three.