A Mother Takes a Nap

Hannah Tennant-Moore

as if
       pleasure could be
                         cut from time
          rare rose time
          pale and soft
          rare and rose
          a clean sharp cut
          from the center
          of pale rare time
 
                        a circle cut
 
                                   out from rose
 
                       rare pale time

      as if the body
      could trace
      slowly and pointlessly
                    the circle of
                    sex and sleep
                    and sleepless
                    rest and
                    restless sex
                    and honey
                    crystals dissolving
                    in hot water
                    and hot skin
                    caressing cool
                    water and
                    the sharp scent
                    of lilacs
                    and damp grass
                    beneath a heavy blanket,
                    warm in darkness
 
as if
        deprivation were
        a hole
        the size of
        the body
        cut out
        of time into which
        the body might
        fit itself—it
 
                                         would be
                                                  the
                                           perfect nest

Hannah Tennant-Moore is a queer novelist, essayist, critic, and poet. Her novel Wreck and Order (Hogarth/Random House, 2016) was long-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and her writing appears in The Sun, Tin House, n+1, The New Republic, the Sho Poetry Journal, and ONE ART. She is at work on a poetry collection called The Virginity I Should've Lost.