Rochelle Hurt
one finds a field of empty eyelids,
an orchard of four-fingered hands, split
trunks and, climbing them, a slew of awkward kids,
not quite anything
yet. One is never
twenty-six in Between—only
halfway to twenty-seven,
or five quarters past twenty-five.
The children in Between don’t feel
strongly. They wish. They wash. They lack
conviction. But one could say, their grandmothers
remind each other, they are going places.
In Between, infants turn
like clock hands in their sleep, grape toes
grazing wooden pegs, ticking crib bar
to crib bar.
They refuse empty spaces
and the settlement of limbs, deadly
and comfortable as even numbers.
In the hour after copper pupils emerge
in the yard, and before the green street
lamps click off below their bedroom windows,
Between’s mothers dream. They have only
ever wanted to get to This, Georgia,
or the lesser known That.
Often, they are caught
for days in the gloam of waking.