Verdad Magazine Volume 30
Spring 2021, Volume 30
Poetry by Al Maginnes
Light Pollution
It’s likely we never sleep fully.
Science says the lights
of our devices, aglow with recharging,
fracture the dark we need, burrow
beneath our eyes, beneath the bone-deep sleep
bodies need. So we wake, cramped
and sore, brains already buzzing. We blame weather,
age, bad food for our fatigue
as we reach for our phones like smokers stretching
to swallow the first puff of the day.
There are nights I come awake in the electricity
of 3 am, feel the junctions in my body
jangle, circuits burning, all the crossed wires
of my skeleton and soft organs snapping
response to the glow of phone and computer,
the passionless start of television.
Like most, I’m tethered to the surge
and voltage of this dimension
and swim up from sleep a few times each night.
Sometimes I get up to pee, then start
out the window where streetlights cast their glow
and join the globe of light
that smothers all the little darknesses
we close our eyes to hide from.
BIO: My eighth collection of poetry, Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift, was published last spring by Redwing Press. My seventh book, The Next Place, was published in spring of 2017 by Iris Press. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Lake Effect, American Journal of Poetry, Tar River Poetry and many other places. I live in Raleigh NC and have recently retired from teaching.