Sleep Paralysis

By Tracey Knapp / Issue 10

The road is dry and also wet. I cannot

find a breath to fill my stiffened lungs nor grasp

something to cure me. It’s dark outside.

The sun burns through the last of night.

Last night, I walked a glittering path

to get here, asthmatic. I never arrived. I woke

up not knowing the street. I pressed the softening

sidewalk with my handprint, wrote my name

and date of birth. That dry day, they filled the dead

potholes with cement. Every day after the rain,

it doesn’t rain. Fog firms over the cliffs

or rolls over the trees. I was here once

before but I’ve never been here

breathing. There are footsteps

walking towards and away from me.

I try to trace their path with my ears, a breath,

my new hand. I do not recognize my hand,

which hand, the one hand I wrote this with.

TRACEY KNAPP is a poet living in Berkeley, California. Her first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Knapp has received awards and scholarships from La Romita School of Art in Italy, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets and The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, and has appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Five Points, The New Ohio Review and elsewhere.