all I’ve really sought is a pocket of warmth, life 
can be that I think, despite experience, but the product 
of desire hinges upon a capacity to abandon 
obligation in favour of a duty to joy 
or at least to the capacity to swim in a sea 
of azure voices, crickets in the dark say 
or the small stirring of night birds, plunk of water 
falling from a low height 
resulting in that slow unclench, chest wall lifts 
dark air lung infill, once concretized in trauma 
remedied by the solicitude of warm 
skin damp from water undulating under starlight  

healing reaches the limit of hope, that’s when 
a life takes off, when meaning comes back, its hand 
outstretched to meet yours, curled edge to its smile 
less a blade and more the promise 
of a mojito along some fairy-lit canal 
but it’s the silent passage of hunters you know 
there, but never quite breach the yellow light 
or expectation, mind’s favourite perfume, top note 
usually an owl intermittently calling, small cold thread 
sound of thin wind coming down mountainside 
or stirring the water close in, as if some creature 
were hunting the shallows 

just want to hang, loosely rolled in a mosquito net 
or hole up, the same way a badger does 
when it gets too cold at night, or when its babies 
are due, or maybe, sitting by myself at some small 
wooden taverna at the edge of a busy quay 
smell of fish and coffee, long tail of baguette and oranges 
jam smeared on a knife, half-filled crossword 
and time to be silent, be here, where ever that is 
without moving in pain, or coma induced by 
belaboured memory, instead, abed with mosquito net 
tucked, safety of temporary harbour, or an acknowledged 
seat at the table, either way, invisible to the biting kind, you become 
expected to life’s wildlife, that sensation of lungs that finally take 
a full breath, what I suppose is the body’s knowledge of hope 

Pearl Button lives in the Salishan Territories of western North America. She is published or forthcoming in a variety of journals including The Literary Cauldron, Posit, SurVision Magazine, Skink Beat Review, Impspired and Peculiar Mormyrid.