Coda
Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care
~ William Shakespeare
I lie down on my familiar bed
Give up the weight of life
Let go slowly
to the feeling of floating
In sleep, the sweetness
of forgetting
I suck on the lozenge of sleep
the lozenge of forgetfulness
Sleep is a drug
the ecstasy of forgetting
Sleep is a wafer
on my tongue
let it dissolve
Am I looking for closure?
This is the coda of my life
the refrain repeats
I suck on the teats of sleep,
the full teats of sleep
The coda of my life
In the end, the refrain repeats
A Little Movie
A little movie runs through my mind
There you are, you you you
There is an expanse of skin
unclothed, I touch with my fingers
learning like braille the feel of you
little kisses all over your breasts
big mounds of pleasure tipped with dusky
plum nipples, inverted nipples
that I suck gently, then very hard
please suck them please suck them you say
this is my first truly erotic poem
plums remind me of you
Dinah Dietrich lives and writes in Scotia, New York. She holds a B.A. in writing from Bennington College and an M.A. in Literature from U.Mass./Amherst. She is the author of PAPER CRANES (Headmistress Press, 2015). Her Pushcart Prize-nominated story, "The Woman Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming," was published in 2012 in Recovering the Self Journal. She has several other publications of individual poems, as well as a column "A Love Letter to My Muse" in elephant journal.
