life in the body yet

Jerl Surratt

Light before dawn breaks, the sky suffused
with what a cloudless morning promises
is light enough that it unsettles you,
as I am privileged to know, and so
I rouse myself that you’ll not need to wake
and gently as I can untangle limbs
our dreaming’s thread us through.

Letting down the shade
I’ve long left up on turning in,
I wonder why this habit
is still so hard to break,
since I don’t need to see the stars
that I’ve stopped wasting wishes on --
one wish above all others met in you,
who under covers I resettle with,
the room again as dark as it was all night
except for the source of light and heat
I curl against, curve into and embrace.

Jerl Surratt has lived full time in Hudson, NY since 2017, after working in NYC as a writer and advisor to nonprofits in the fields of civil rights, early childhood education, health care, medical research, historic preservation, and the visual arts. His poems have been published in The Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, The New Criterion and other journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Tor House Prize for Poetry by judge Marie Howe. Find out more at www.jerlsurratt.com