Moment

   When you turned to me—you in bed, still sleepwarm, against

                                                                               the pillows,

I across the room, skirt zipped, stockings on—

and you asked, so quietly,

"Was that a truthful answer?"

and outside our narrow third-storey window

the Norway maple was poking odd thumbs into the sky

and a skim milk early morning light leaked down the street,

down front porch steps, around grimed collars of snowbanks,

and the oval Victorian mirror of my dresser

reflected all that, with odd angles and rooflines, gutters, chimneys

                                                    jutting into its peripheral vision,

your question cut

like a knife so sharpened it

    slices clean and the surprised flesh doesn't know for a moment 

                                                                               how to bleed,

and I answered, after a pause

in which the strangeness felt like a form of love,

"No."

—Rosanna Warren