By Lauren Hilger

The place has carved out my sleep. I walk it every night.

On moving here, there were old sounds,
sputtering meter at the end of a cab ride,

or the back of the ferry, its engine like the
low-end keys of a baby grand,

like a whale, centuries away.

Then too I believed the beauty of things I didn’t have,

an evening shrug. light blue, dark red stained-glass windows, staged
and elaborate.

The noun <<cicatrice>>
that sounds more like it,

the citron glow of a scar, still there, the sour of the word,

the softness of the word ruins, the softness of inward ruins,

my signature.

We still measure how long we will live.

Poet Bio

Lauren Hilger (she/her) earned a BA from New York University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) and Morality Play (Poetry Northwest Editions, 2022). Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Since 2016, she has hosted a monthly workshop and reading series at FRIEDAcommunity in Philadelphia. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens. See More By This Poet

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