Maxed My Bedroom: Mourning Aubade
This morning as I roused from sleep—
I felt your gentle sweetness enter
as you blossomed
through the lucent doorway—
filling my lavender disheveled bedroom
with your incandescent joy.
I lay there still and listening—
my clutched ribs rising rhythmic—
inhaling deeply—mixing you in me
with each breath—your essence felting
cellbound—and me inside these longing cells—
my heart summoning your sound—your scent—
your shimmer in your lovely skin.
Yet how could you—sweet abundance—
have ever fit your earthen
wounded tired frame
from which you willfully slipped?
I gazed at you—subtle—yet immense
surround—my mind’s eye awake—
thanking you again for enfolding me
in love and hope with which to flounder
through another day or week.
It’s okay—everything—you whispered,
now take this day and live it.
And me to you—
You were always this.
.
Koss (she/they/them) is a queer poet, writer, and artist with publications in Chiron Review, Mom Egg Review, Michigan Quarterly (Mixtapes), Cincinnati Review (miCro), Spillway, diode poetry, Five Points, Spoon River Poetry Review, MoonPark Review, Bending Genres, Prelude Magazine, and many others. Anthologies include Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, The Dead of Winter III, and many others. They’ve received numerous award nominations and won the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest. Their chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, is due out from Diode Editions in 2024.
Amethyst Review 