Pillow Talk

There are words in my pillow

mumbled indistinct

water over rocks in a stream

burbling.

I try to form them,

string sounds into meaning—

I get nowhere;

there is no sense, no value.

Perhaps these are only echoes

of music and late nights stuck

between the mattress and my head.

Maybe the cantina down the street

pumps up the bass

and it pounds like sex

from its walls to mine

while the singer is wailing

in Spanish about lost love

and I cannot hear well enough

to interpret her pain.

It could be the sound of stale memories

or something that got lost in the sheets

that night we were eating honey grahams

still hungry after we made love.

I don’t think they have always been here

those misguided phantoms

that invade the down feathers

to tickle my fancy, enter my dreams.

I’ve changed my pillows, tried to force them

from their home under my head

but they are persistent, strangely familiar

as if they don’t want me to sleep alone anymore.

Charlene Stegman Moskal is a Teaching Artist for the Las Vegas Poetry Promise Organization. Charlene is published in numerous anthologies, print magazines and online. Her second chapbook, Leavings From My Table,” (Finishing Line Press), will be released in October, 2022.