Sea Change

by Amy Hughes

I miss you. Or perhaps,

it’s you that’s missing from me.

There’s a drained ocean

on your side of my sheets.

I’m all aware, in all of me

of the vacuum that loudly breathes

in the falling dark

those cooler nights

when I shut my curtains before the sun’s

gone out, and lie awake

in searing, undernourished light.

Sometimes I feel drowned

in thoughts of you. But my honesty –

cruel and sharp-toothed thing –

suggests it’s just a feeling I am missing:

that peculiar filled-ness of the spaces you exist in.

The way a room with you inside

suddenly brims

with lights, shifting, and life

and the feeling we felt

on that purple-skied

and premature-moon-lit night.

The desert slept under the stars

but to our itching eyes

it seemed to buzz. Bare terrain

it seemed to us back then:

pale Martian ground receding

to oblivions too far to see.

I miss the way

your body filled these sheets.

They say every desert

was an ocean once, but the sky

that bleeds around my curtain’s not the one

we kissed beneath

with lights, shifting, and life

I can hear it breathe

and rasping taunt into a restless night.

The rains will come, and drum

red earth into a sea.

‘Til then I starve.

You are missing from me.