I Have Slept in Many Places
After Diane Seuss
First in the womb, my own space capsule
in my mother’s universe, my eyelids sticky with pre-birth,
then the incubator and crib, which I didn’t recognize
as a prison until years later when my sister stood inside it
and I, rising from my first big-girl bed, unlatched her
because she was hungry for breakfast. Then my grammy’s
four-poster, kiddie sleeping bag, the hospital bed,
where I was hoarse after I relinquished my tonsils. A mat
during kindergarten naptime, the backseat of my mother’s car,
another hospital bed with silver bars on the side
where I wrote my first stories. The double bed I shared
with my sister when our twins gave out. A college dorm
mattress with another girl’s period stain, a damp study-abroad
bed in Wales, Eurail seats where I could sleep overnight
and save money on a hostel if I picked the right schedule.
Hostel bunk beds with bathrooms down the hall. A friend’s
waterbed, another friend’s bed on her father’s boat.
Then my cousin’s hand-me-down mattress
in my first apartment in Boston, a boyfriend’s bed
in Revere, a bed of another boy hoping to make
my Revere boyfriend jealous. Sublet beds,
a bed in a furnished studio apartment in Tucson
where there was no way of knowing who’d slept on it
before me. Futon in the East Village right on the floor.
Same futon on a used loft bed to suspend me above the mice.
Then a lavender pullout Mary Richards couch.
Vacation beds, hotel beds. More boyfriend beds
in Brooklyn and Alphabet City. Hotel beds.
Florida marital bed and another hospital bed—
this time surgery. Divorce bed (same as marital bed
with mattress flipped for good luck). Evacuation beds
during hurricanes. My true-love’s bed with its magic
mattress topper. I know I am forgetting so many places—
subways, lounge chairs in the sand, Amtrack seats,
movie theaters, hammocks, my niece’s college graduation
(I had taken a Vicodin), conference beds, beds at colleges
or hotels after I’d given poetry readings, emergency row
plane seats, on my mother’s breast when I was an
infant, in my father’s arms after a childhood asthma attack.
My parents’ bed after their deaths. I’m heading
for the hard coffin bed myself, my eyes sewn shut
against insomnia. I’ve asked the undertaker
to press glow-in-the-dark stars inside the lid.
