(Ján Jakub Naništa/Unsplash)

Now it is midnight.
Inside the house
rooms begin to change.
Something in them
ripens and swells
and pushes against
all four walls.

Call it night
or the silence of night
or something silent that
happens at night—

when shipwrecked dreamers,
drowning in sleep,
sink ever lower
as cold currents keep
easing them down
into their own
inner deep.

Published in the November 2020 issue: View Contents
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Tom Hansen’s poems appear in recent or forthcoming issues of the Midwest Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, New American Writing, Southern Poetry Review, and others. His book Falling to Earth was published by BOA Editions.

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