I Have Slept in Many Places

First in the womb, my own space capsule

in my mother’s universe, my eyelids sticky with pre-birth,

then the incubator and crib, which I didn’t recognize

as a prison until years later when my sister stood inside it

and I, rising from my first big-girl bed, unlatched her

because she was hungry for breakfast. Then my grammy’s

four-poster, kiddie sleeping bag, the hospital bed,

where I was hoarse after I relinquished my tonsils. A mat

during kindergarten naptime, the backseat of my mother’s car,

another hospital bed with silver bars on the side

where I wrote my first stories. The double bed I shared

with my sister when our twins gave out. A college dorm

mattress with another girl’s period stain, a damp study-abroad

bed in Wales, Eurail seats where I could sleep overnight

and save money on a hostel if I picked the right schedule.

Hostel bunk beds with bathrooms down the hall. A friend’s

waterbed, another friend’s bed on her father’s boat.

Then my cousin’s hand-me-down mattress

in my first apartment in Boston, a boyfriend’s bed

in Revere, a bed of another boy hoping to make

my Revere boyfriend jealous. Sublet beds,

a bed in a furnished studio apartment in Tucson

where there was no way of knowing who’d slept on it

before me. Futon in the East Village right on the floor.

Same futon on a used loft bed to suspend me above the mice.

Then a lavender pullout Mary Richards couch.

Vacation beds, hotel beds. More boyfriend beds

in Brooklyn and Alphabet City. Hotel beds.

Florida marital bed and another hospital bed—

this time surgery. Divorce bed (same as marital bed

with mattress flipped for good luck). Evacuation beds

during hurricanes. My true-love’s bed with its magic

mattress topper. I know I am forgetting so many places—

subways, lounge chairs in the sand, Amtrak seats,

movie theaters, hammocks, my niece’s college graduation

(I had taken a Vicodin), conference beds, beds at colleges

or hotels after I’d given poetry readings, emergency row

plane seats, on my mother’s breast when I was an

infant, in my father’s arms after a childhood asthma attack.

My parents’ bed after their deaths. I’m heading

for the hard coffin bed myself, my eyes sewn shut

against insomnia. I’ve asked the undertaker

to press glow-in-the-dark stars inside the lid.