In The Yellow of Daylight Blinds

There is a map in my room, pressed around the curve of a globe and lit from the inside.

We do not expand, we settle -- in -- 

we shrink

I tell myself I love it because it is beautiful, because it casts the shadow of places I haven’t been, and things I may never know, and names larger than mine on my wall.

But I think, truly I love it because it makes the world small enough.

In college I learned how to drape my arm across a man’s chest, I learned that I would never find a constellation to call my own until I learned the map of the moles on your back under my tracing palms and pressed the shape of it to my lips

I am surprised by the strength in my arms.

We exist only in the hollow of your bed, inside the yellow of daylight blinds -- the world is as small as the space from your headboard to the shower curtain in the window of the second floor apartment visible across the fire escapes.

There is a world in my room the size of a child’s balloon, tucked into a corner and plugged into an outlet whose switch is taped to the wall so that it is always “ON”. 

The ghosts of your legs wrap around me in my sleep

Light fills it from the inside, shows the glue cracking as it tapes the line of the equator around the world’s dotted waist. Antarctica is interrupted by a plastic axis. 

What is this heaviness in my chest? Where does it come from? The only thing that solves it is the weight of you, the weight of you to press it out of me

I wish the floor glowed beneath me the same yellow as the color of North America on the map, when all the other lights in my room are out and this tiny world is my nightlight, my compass, my axis -- 

The yellow of daylight blinds touches your shoulder in strips, my only proof of a world outside

your arms

I wish the floor glowed yellow under my feet, 

in the shadows that trace your moles and jigsaw your bone 

that I could travel the space between here and the South Pacific as quickly as my fingers can spin the sphere from one to the other. 

to fit into the space where the light falls.

If my life were mapped out and pressed round the globe and lit from the inside, what shapes would be made, where would the oceans fall, what land masses would form and be broken by glaciers or torn about by war and blood and greed, and where would the light be brightest?

There is a watch on my wrist, with arms that circumnavigate the globe every sixty minutes. There are no tick marks for hours, only the bolded outlines of continents. 

I fill myself with the light of your sleep-breathing, fill the hollow under your chin with my honey crown, expand to fill the darkness at the edges of our bodies and press against it

A man who I love wrapped this watch round my wrist when I told him I could never strap time to myself -- too much obligation, too much of the weight that comes with awareness -- too much care for the passing, made pain by measurement.

In the yellow of daylight blinds I wake up rolled onto my back shivering with your snore in my ear; in your half-sleep you wrap the blanket round me, 

But the watch with the map in the center has no numbers, and the golden arms are hidden in the colors of the map beneath them. 

drag the window shut -- the shadows from the blinds bend and shake then settle into place as your arm finds the hollow of my waist again.

The arms circle and spin and return and they are the sun rising over Antarctica and Africa and all of Europe in an hour.

Christie Flemming