morning/night poetry

A Man and A Woman Sleep on the Same Bed

by Shriram Sivaramakrishnan

a twin bed is enough to house the dreams of gazillion battalions. what a battalion dreams i don’t know but battalions across ages dream similar deaths, which is to say we are not armies fending off the hopes of each other, we are just two individuals minding our own isomerism of sleep, which is not to say that our dreams are dissimilar to those of a battalion but that we are battles that fight in the longitudes of our bodies. i the man- battle, you the battle i dabble with in my dream. you turn like the music of a zinc-footed gazelle while i the cello that guards its strings from the melody they can give rise to. each of my dream a protrusion in the plateau of my sleep. in the next room is my electric trimmer, plugged to a 3- pin socket, a black whale built by Philips, its saw-toothed humming grounded by the eloquent flow of 230 V 50 Hz sinusoidal current. switched on, it whirrs its baleen into a bazooka, strumming the razor song of its solitude the way i do in my dreams where time grows short like the pant necking the heel bones protruding from the prologue of my feet. my sleep is a race course for night- mares, my body an un-stable for their pillage. horses for dis- courses works here. —
Shriram Sivaramakrishnan recently completed his MA in Poetry from the UK. He is primarily a poet. His poems have appeared in Lemon Hound, Bird’s Thumb, Softblow, Noble/Gas Quarterly, Allegro, The Mondegreen among others. He tweets at @shriiram.
Artwork by: Emily Wiethorn Emily Wiethorn (b.1991) is a photographic artist currently based in Lincoln, NE where she will graduate with her MFA in Studio Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is an Instructor of Record and holds a Graduate Teaching Assistantship. She received her BFA in Photography from Northern Kentucky University. She has most recently been awarded the 2017 SPE Student Award for Innovations in Imaging, was a Critical Mass finalist in 2017, a finalist for The Texas Photographic Society’s National Photography Award, and is a featured artist in the spring 2018 issue of PDNedu. Her work has been published online with Musee Magazine, Lenstratch, Loosen Art, among others. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in China and Italy. She works primarily in self-portraiture where she explores notions of feminine identity, societal constructs of femininity, and self-discovery. Links Website: www.emilywiethorn.com Instagram: @emily.wiethorn
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