Night Power Outage by Lindsey Bellosa

The abyss of silence!

Weak dreams are snared

on hooks of darkness.

Tethered  together,

we face the night:

suddenly bared.

The baby grunts, too small

to wonder what slithers

in such sharp-cornered darkness.

Our boy’s voice, tremulous.

Oh love! I can tuck you into blankets,

but can’t smooth blackness.

The silence has such lumps in it,

such bumps in it.  If a dog barks,

if a star falls: we will hear it.

Pains poke through: little worms!

They come to nibble us,

to remind our cold bones:

There are holes in the night sky.

Demons whisper in the gaps;

dreams fall into chasms of black.

Lindsey Bellosa has an MA in Writing from the National University of Galway, Ireland and has been published in both Irish and American magazines and journals.  She won the 2012 Red Poppy Review's Summer Poetry Contest.  Her first chapbook, The Hunger, has recently been published with Willet Press.  She lives and teaches in Syracuse, NY.