Between tricks I play on myself to fall asleep
I imagine what it’d be like to spend a whole day
in bed, not with dread like right now as I pray
for rest before a morning alarm like napalm
in the ear drum, war drum of high school hallway
feet marching as one long doldrum of adolescence.
I could spend a whole day, I bet to myself, meals
the only timeout and rice swallows easy when
Mom and Dad are mad again, a game of silence
between chopstick clinks in family-style stoneware.
I planned on watching four Wes Anderson movies
that day, a marathon of colors to finish an oeuvre
and cross another off my list. Movies streamed
illegally are perks of the free market, a laptop
on my twin-sized bed the millennial culture.
Later my father blames this habit for my curved
spine under weighted shoulders, grabbing them
and forcing my back to stand a little straighter.
He did this once to my sister as we sat in front
of the couch, watching football on Thanksgiving.
Lions leading. He tells her to sit more like a lady.
I try to fall asleep sitting upright after breaking
a woman’s heart the first time. They say I act
like I was the one who got dumped. I only sleep
on this couch now, a sectional deep and velvet
and an ottoman as well, pushed into the corner
like a makeshift bed, facing a sixty-inch screen
my parents also bought me. There’s nothing
I can claim as my own. Only my spine stiff
from a night’s worth of gravity and a big head
unsupported. I stack pillows, collapse upon
cushions because I am faint and bereft, sleep
aids as benzodiazepine and Vicodin tag team
to knock me out. Eight months pass and GERD
creeps into my body’s crevices, bile between
breaths after every twelve-piece McNuggets.
Lately, everything hurts. My cat scratches
the couch’s corner and I don’t know what she
wants anymore. I don’t know what to do.
I throw my gym shorts at her scratching
the patio door, six in the morning, birds out
chirping and it’s a new day. Her scamper
plays in my head. I turn towards the cushions.
I am refusing to see, I can’t accept attention
is all love means and, ultimately, all it can be.
Matthew Zhao is a PhD student at Florida State University and co-editor of poetry for the Southeast Review. He was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Mississippi Review Prize, and Florida Review Editor’s Prize, and an honorable mention in Booth‘s Susan Neville Prize. His poems appear in swamp pink, Four Way Review, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.
