They Have One Day
Caroline Maun
I learned to sleep in the not-night
of the amber streetlamp,
window open to summer currents
lambent with the flicker of wings.
All those fish flies thinking
the Sunoco’s white tile
is the brightest moon ever,
how they all plan to meet
there at dusk to dance,
their frenzy in that adamant light.
By morning, they’ll adhere
wherever, in quietude,
waiting for the end.
Heaps of them are swept up
by the push broom
in the next day’s incandescence.
Caroline Maun is an associate professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She teaches creative writing and American literature and is the Chair. Her poetry publications include the volumes The Sleeping (Marick Press, 2006), What Remains (Main Street Rag, 2013), and three chapbooks, Cures and Poisons and Greatest Hits, both published by Puddinghouse Press, and Accident, published by Alice Greene & Co. Her poetry has appeared in The Bear River Review, The MacGuffin, Third Wednesday, Peninsula Poets, and Eleven Eleven, among other places.