Midwinter, an Approach

By Nathan Manley

When sleep, like an overflown bath, took you
into the cold recesses of the floor,

past the dusty scents of pine and gypsum,
the musk of scuttling mice, their papered nests,

you heard spiders, small, frost-fled and coffined
in the walls, all click and spindle, slinking:

season of invisible hosts, late wind
rummaging the lent libraries of trees.

From bed, the scalding water’s swirling pulse
inside the coils of a radiator

piped out the song of your own blood, humming,
as it does, in what silence deigns to fall

upon your never-unperceiving ear.
And a friend you scarcely recognized spoke,

in a dream, of all the things he’d fed on
in the underworld. You woke to the taste

of stone. Just beyond the wall, floorboards groaned
beneath your neighbor, turning in her sleep—

some other dream you seemed to scent the edge of.

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Nathan Manley is a writer and erstwhile English teacher from Loveland, Colorado. He is the author of two chapbooks, Numina Loci (Mighty Rogue Press, 2018) and Ecology of the Afterlife (Split Rock Press, 2021). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Portland Review, Natural Bridge, Spillway, Puerto del Sol, Crab Creek Review, and others.