Asleep
by Barbara Fletcher


I want to write a letter to my narcoleptic muse,
asleep under thick and warm duvets,
on rattling streetcars along Queen Street,
beside the pier where silver-blue ice fissures and flows
as one continuous frozen wave.

I want to write and find out how she's
getting along without me.
But she would never get to the end of the note
without slipping into sleep,
without laying to rest all of those beautiful
and necessary words,
without closing her eyes and drifting into
the cold, unreachable hyperlimnion of sleep.






Copyright © 2024 by Red River Review. First Rights Reserved. All other rights revert to the authors.
No work may be reproduced or republished without the express written consent of the author.