Nights After

I am single in queenless king,
alone in bed we’d always shared.
In troubled dreams I tumble, wake
and turn, remember where her hips
once rose, the downward drift of breasts
in sleep, the slide of hair, the sound
of breath from love drunk lips. I miss
the slur and slip of sex, the way
she welcomed my desire and gave
her own to me, the bump and bruise
and dirty words, the morning shame,
the blush and rush, a creature spooked,
an animal in flight and gone,
how she stayed girlish all her life,
as if finding both sex and me,
surprise!, a gift through weeks and years,
through decades of. But now, now
nothing here but vast plain of sheet,
no curve, no warmth to comfort me,
no sleeping breath like lullaby
to call my dreams through dark to me,
no heat or heart to bend the plane
and round my world into a sphere.

Cecil Morris's debut poetry collection "At Work in the Garden of Possibilities" will be out from Main Street Rag in 2025. He also has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and other literary