Reversed by Kaila Gallacher

September 6, 2023
Poem title: Reversed Poet name: Kaila Gallacher Poem: if there was any proof needed that the world and I are at odds. displaced. it is here. when the sun finds me. chilled and wide wake. at 6AM. watching the steady bleaching of the night sky as the world ever so slightly lightens to begin your dawn. it is in that steady elliptical movement. that dance refracted in a linear time. it is a dawn that looks more like twilight, reads more like Kafka. it is a reversed sunset in a mirror on fire, to weary eyes that have yet to be able to trust sleep. it is the solidity of contention in that singular moment while I’m dreading sunrise because of what it says. what it says. night is over. and I’m greeting the sun’s light on the wrong side of a coin. while others found here are imbedded in that ever forward movement of riverbed time. I am a rock unable to flow forward. or rewind. unable to stop the unrestrained flow of moments the river brings me. when your dawn begins shaking you awake, your eyes bleary fighting to break from sleep, I stand at the mouth of the coming dawn, arms across my chest bracing myself against the cold of dawn’s mocking beauty. I stand at the coming of day waiting for sleep or for days that bring nights that remember how to hold me. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Kaila Gallacher Previously published in Acta Victoria 145:2. Kaila Gallacher is the author of mo nighean: the universe inside the comma, a chapbook published by the Soapbox Press. Her writing has been featured in various anthologies and literary journals in Canada and the UK.