Thursday Shift
How lovely it is to be her
shadow space, the outlines
of her solid, the dark of her bark’s
strength. She cradles the wind
by limb fingers, she caresses
the thunder with her thumbs. A place
where the sun heats after-
noon air, where the cat finds
relief from the numb
summer, where the leaves like shadow-
puppets remind me it’s the day
for trash collection.
Lilia Dobos is a Linguistics PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poems have previously been published in New Mexico Review, The Shore Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Barely South Review, and elsewhere.
