Author: Julia C. Alter

I wake from a night sweat
to a cold snap, negative twenty
windchill and the shape of your name
bobbing towards the shore
of the bed. My love brings me
coffee and a question:
tell you the terrible things
now, or tell them to you later?
A boat and a life raft,
a boy and an ocean. Yesterday,
another murder in Minnesota.
Agents in tactical gear, waging war
against the foreign bodies
in their own hearts they never
loved enough to teach to swim.
We hold each other well
into the morning, saying
the loud things quietly,
and the quiet things out loud.