Sleep of Forgiveness

by Joanna Sit 

Midnight midsummer     the breeze
Is soft up on the eighth
floor      The world cleaned 
by yesterday’s rainstorm    
In my half bitten dreams
I drift and drift
between vignettes    Silence
shines through the lowered 
hands of grace

Empty in its completeness
I keep still    keep my many eyes
closed    keep my pulse slow
from leaping     from one desire
to another      I try to hold myself
I put one hand over the other    In one 
dream I am a ghost then 
an angel     In another I am the sacred
lotus opening       In the last one I peel
an orange and I am water

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Joanna Sit was born in China and grew up in New York City, where she lives with her family. She studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer at Brooklyn College and now teaches Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. She is the author of My Last Century (2012), In Thailand with the Apostles (2014), and most recently, Track Works. Her poem "Timescape: The Age of Oz" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2016. She is working on an ethnographic narrative called The Reincarnation of Red and another book of poems called Fantastic Voyage.