I am not sleeping all night in a big hotel by the sea.
Patti Smith is listening to Queen Cement.
You don’t push the bad thing off but let it break off on its own.
So if meaning has you in it and truth does not, then certain things are for certain, and it’s okay if what you call meaning is important, and if in any total collapse of meaning you can imagine, this is the temperature.
I’ll leave my body now to its moment.
Snow lines the black river.
You have desolation in your soul.
I’ll just jiggle it to fix it.
Lesle Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry, including A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014) and the chapbook It's Rothko in Winter or Belgium (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). She lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Landmark College in Vermont.