Though she knows better the girl still says nightmere, a relic of early language when she also said 
fleamingos and girled cheese. Nightmere as if to belittle: merely at night, merely a vision, and not some 
charging, lathered mare galloping through dreams to tear and divot the fragile terrain of sleep with 
rough-shod hooves. She holds onto this verbal tic and I my mother’s ear, which hears her steps 
outside our room past 2 am, her tall 13-year-old body filling the doorframe and a whimper of 
explanation: nightmere. And so she log rolls between us stiff at first, no longer familiar with the 
sensation of family bed, sleeping between the two bodies that made hers. Soon she curls toward 
fetal, her body’s twitches a metronome to better dreams, her mind shifting to work that can’t be 
done in the waking world. She rolls toward me, slings an arm around my waist and sighs.

Moon bright, surf roar and 
this rare comfort—now I can’t
sleep from such delight.