NIGHT SCENE
Walk home from the corner store. Moth skittering the porch light. Trace the outline
of my hands held above me to make dance for the shadow stretched out over the
driveway. Even in the empty street there is dance. Everything must be specific.
Cobalt. Porcelain. Zoning pole about thirty feet high. Touching a star. Touching a
singularity. I discover myself three–fold. Mouth full of bitters in the dark, pouring
drink from the bar stand in my married friends’ living room. Cotton slippers on my
feet, calluses peeling onto the wood. What I can’t tell you: daybreak, red meat, glass
plate, I mean day after day the blue crystal of dawn, shiver and sinew, the wheat silo
on the country road. I’ve been there—where the family eats breakfast, on the porch
of the farmhouse. I’ll leap all I want: The way the car skids over the curb, the full of
my body after a meal. Pull me close. You, pull me close to you. Let me air it all out.
Take it in heavy like pulling pig fat through your teeth.
of my hands held above me to make dance for the shadow stretched out over the
driveway. Even in the empty street there is dance. Everything must be specific.
Cobalt. Porcelain. Zoning pole about thirty feet high. Touching a star. Touching a
singularity. I discover myself three–fold. Mouth full of bitters in the dark, pouring
drink from the bar stand in my married friends’ living room. Cotton slippers on my
feet, calluses peeling onto the wood. What I can’t tell you: daybreak, red meat, glass
plate, I mean day after day the blue crystal of dawn, shiver and sinew, the wheat silo
on the country road. I’ve been there—where the family eats breakfast, on the porch
of the farmhouse. I’ll leap all I want: The way the car skids over the curb, the full of
my body after a meal. Pull me close. You, pull me close to you. Let me air it all out.
Take it in heavy like pulling pig fat through your teeth.
JH Grimes is a trans Appalachian poet and collage artist. Author of the chapbook keepsake (Bottlecap Press, 2024), their work also appears in Poetry Wales, poets.org, Devastation Baby, and elsewhere. They are the recipient of Frontier Poetry’s 2025 Misfit Poems Prize selected by Marianne Chan, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and have received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Most recently, they were featured in Papaya Press’s Richard Siken anthology, Tell Me About the Dream. Currently an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia, they serve as Poetry Editor for Meridian.
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