the Boy in the Gap

Wake before dawn, just in time to watch a blood orange sun rise over the Hudson River, watch its tangerine drips through the barren trees. The branches are getting knotty, they look like your glasses are getting old and you need a stronger prescription, like the trees are all out of focus. Soon, soon the world outside this window will burst into life, soon my lungs will remember how to breathe, I will remember  how to wake, I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light. Downstairs, the children wake, the morning rises, we are a year into the end of the world but we
live.