'SLEEPER'
by Helen Vitoria

There is a red skirt
lifted with raw knucklebone

near my mattress
& god’s a sleeper eye

darkness is on her knees
like a battered wound
hard on pavement

his October branded shoulders
change against impending March

heaving like breath
like blue drowning in the lungs

there is so much left, after the taking



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Helen Vitoria lives and writes in Effort PA. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in many journals including: elimae, PANK, Mud Luscious Press, Poets & Artists Magazine and Dark Sky Magazine. Her chapbook, "The Sights & Sounds of Arctic Birds," is available as an e-chap from Gold Wake Press, 2011. She has been thrice nominated for Best New Poets Anthology 2010. She is completing her first full length collection: "Corn Exchange," with an expected release Fall, 2011.