Annette Sisson
Instinct for Touch
We wake. The owls
convulse the woods below.
Stiff as possums,
we lie on a rummaged
mattress, the screened
porch our answer
to April’s early swelter.
Their bellows, hoots,
call and response,
their instinct for touch—
like our bodies,
sleep’s arrival, even
in heat’s ruthless press,
sheathed in barest gauze,
brush of sheet on skin.
And we long to touch
the dead, loft words
to dormant ears,
voices to clouds
beseeching rain,
its graze, thunder,
its burst, antiphonal
rumble from the other
side. We are owls
coveting the dark
echo of our need,
naked slumberers
reaching for cover.
convulse the woods below.
Stiff as possums,
we lie on a rummaged
mattress, the screened
porch our answer
to April’s early swelter.
Their bellows, hoots,
call and response,
their instinct for touch—
like our bodies,
sleep’s arrival, even
in heat’s ruthless press,
sheathed in barest gauze,
brush of sheet on skin.
And we long to touch
the dead, loft words
to dormant ears,
voices to clouds
beseeching rain,
its graze, thunder,
its burst, antiphonal
rumble from the other
side. We are owls
coveting the dark
echo of our need,
naked slumberers
reaching for cover.
Biography
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Annette Sisson (she/her/hers) has published poems in Nashville Review, Typishly, One, HeartWood, Cordella, Psaltery & Lyre, The West Review, and others. She published a chapbook, A Casting Off (Finishing Line, 2019) and was named a 2020 BOAAT Writing Fellow, received honorable mention in Passager’s 2019 poetry contest, and won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s 2019 poetry prize. Her recent book-length poetry manuscript, Small Fish in High Branches, has been a finalist with Glass Lyre Press and a semifinalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize (U of Wisconsin Press).
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