Lately I have been a gap.

Moth clouds follow me to bed.

I counted them: twenty, fifty, block, choke.


In the room where I used to sleep

a breath hangs low on the bed

and hoarsens the room.

No one knows where the air is

charged and released into the world,

but it thistles.


This is how breathing fills a house

with family: breathing to draw

the buzzing to its source

and breathing to lacquer a plugged maze.


How a house fully beamed and walled

is not a house, but a husk.

How a life in the span of a few breaths

becomes a clockless thing.