By the time the light reaches me I’ve already decided not to get up today. 
I watch the sun slats on the gray spread across the gray cat. 
The clock ticks forward, ticking only in my mind since digital clocks 
	don’t tick. 

I wake and time is an hour ahead. 
All week I try to catch up but can’t. 
I decide to live my life an hour off from the rest of the world. 

At night I fall into bed and think: I’ve waited all day for this. 
How can a person’s favorite activity be sleeping? 

In my dreams I travel to the same vague places again and again. 
I live in a house with rooms that never end, one room opening into the 
	other. 
I make mistakes, even in my dreams. 

If, when I look out, I’m looking into the past, where is the future? 
And why can’t I see that hour I lost? 

LeeAnn Pickrell

is a poet, freelance editor, and managing editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, most recently One Art, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, and MacQueen’s Quinterly; and in the anthologies Coffee Poems (2019) and A Trembling of Finches (2017). She has a book forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California, with her partner and two cats.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Hand and Wheel, after Georgia O’Keeffe—Hand and Wheel (1933) by Alfred Stieglitz, in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Ode to Coffee, after a painting by Richard Diebenkorn, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 4, July 2020)