Poem of the day: Solar system bedsheets

Sarah Vap

Solar system bedsheets There, behind sunlight, is the long pressure of a child's love. Becoming mute with the child's love. Long influence of stars touched by the hand wrapped, asleep, in the newly laundered sheets. Touched to widths of butterscotch stretched. Split-apart as the voices, rain thickening, against one another forever, if glass. Forever if resting against one another. Forever if holding the end of a year like this: the nights lengthening. I check: each child is alive in his sleep. You are also asleep, love, at the end of the yarn you are weaving around the edge of a pink paper heart fattening—quieter, now. Forever, if quieter, now.