The Driver’s Seat Sophia Beall

Poems by Will Thurson ‘19

High School

A gift you can’t accept. I wanted to cry when he asked are you ok?

Loneliness in the liminal. Not quite awake and all too aware. The almost friend. Invisibility is most effective in a crowd.

Sum of the undone: spirits of divorce, homework, (falling in love like the dream where you’re falling), unaddressing, unquitting.

Son of endings: Graduations, breaking up, out, waking up, an assessment of lessons and shortcuts.

Some questions hang without finding answers. They wave like windchimes and tell you it’s morning.

Elegy for Sleep

The bone-white teapot prepares for its task: the pillow’s a miser and meters each morning into a neat account of debts. Dusk retreats and dawn rushes to carry the torch.

The patient requires a particular medicine, but in this drought remedies abound: the ceramic mug, the mindless jog, the red blink of an alarm clock.

A cloak of night is hung on the skeleton: knees and elbows knock like dice, teeth and fingertips quiver under the load. The ground tilts sideways, a sense of floating.

The end of the world is no news to encounter in a state like this. It glimmers and beckons like a mirage: You’d better lie down.