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Jackleen Holton

Sleep While the Baby Sleeps

they tell you, and so you begin, like one having to learn 
everything all over again, to take sleep in small sips, 
your body warm and fever-heavy, a jet-lagged sway 
to everything. Day, night, it hardly matters 
anymore, bed, couch or chair by the window, 
sun streaming in through the branches 
of the three-story-high tree, a light like France, 
fifteen years ago: a friend’s centuries-old 
apartment, one room with a bed you got to by ladder, 
so close to the ceiling it almost felt like a grave, 
but for that window full of dappled sunlight, 
and the outdoor market below, the little café 
where earlier that day you ate a gorgeous 
three-cheese pizza, washed it down 
with real champagne, the feel of it on your tongue 
reminding you of the French word 
for freedom, and as you tried to sleep, your stomach 
churned and you felt this was a fair price 
to pay for the pleasure you’d taken in that meal, 
as the little scraps of language floated up 
from the street, a foreign-tongued bargaining, 
so many words you never heard before weaving 
in and out of dreams as light as the crocheted blanket 
you draped over yourself before finally drifting 
away for these few minutes, before the baby’s shrieks 
pull you back over oceans and years, 
and you rise from the chair in the corner, woozy 
from a dream of bubbles in a plastic flute, the buzz 
of a foreign flea market in your head, a freedom 
you can only reach by the rickety ladder of slumber. 

S. Erin Batiste
Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Comstock Review, Dogwood, Poet Lore, Rattle, and others.
Art: Ladder, mixed media, 1993, by Teodor Moraru. Public Domain. 
  
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