Jonathan Louis Duckworth
LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS
In the silver heart of everything
there is a constant quivering.
We think the sky is boneless
only because it hides them well.
The ocean sharpens her teeth
against the shore. The land ponders
the infinitesimal weight
of life on his skin. If you have
ever been awake at the rare hour
neither late nor early, & heard your
own thoughts as threshold sounds
no louder or softer than the tumbling
orbits of oxygen molecules navigating
a nitrogen sea, then perhaps you
saw the quick wedge of yellow
headlight waxing & then waning
through the slit in your curtains,
& you understood tacitly that a universe
had just passed, a weary universe
sipping gas station coffee & trying
not to get hypnotized by the strobing
white meridian lines, each of them
one of Zeno’s infinite series of midpoints
in the expanse between ‘here’ & ‘home.’
Jonathan Louis Duckworth received his MFA from Florida International University. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, Jabberwock Review, Superstition Review, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #22.
