the molting sentence

I just read this lovely chapbook by my former creative writing teacher, Charles Borkhuis. Hypnogogic Sonnets is beautiful and dreamy (duh!), exploring a brilliant liminal state -- not just between sleep and consciousness, but the body and language, as well as... I'm not sure what. Mysterious, ineluctable ideas and experiences. The title of the sequence of sonnets had a powerful effect on my reading of them, tying them and grounding them. I read them more as a long poem, or serial poem, rather than as discrete, stand-alone poems.

Hypnogogic Sonnets kind of inspired me to explore my own hypnogogic state/s, perhaps through writing...


Here are some lines, taken out of context as usual, that particularly resonated:

he will write
of a howling in the grain


in the afterimage
a suffix of suns
behind closed lids


those stretch marks on the sheets


the molting sentence


a numbness sinks
through the bed in stages
a flashlight searching the woods