🌚 Eyes of the Night
They’re everywhere but we can’t see them. Too small to exist on one plane. Here they’ve floated up from the blacktop, dissolved at our feet in a morning rain. No, they aren’t stars, birds, or airplanes. They’re the dreams we don’t remember, the thoughts that whir through our minds before sleep.
🚪 Eyes of a Door
They’re peeking through the grain of the wood. They try to stay open, watching who comes and goes. They see more than we do: a rush of ghosts, a spider crawling, a memory sneaking through. Like cats they hate the door to be closed. But sometimes sleep overtakes them. They wake regretting all they missed.
🙌🏼 Eyes of a Hand
One on every fingertip. They like music, dance with the fingers, see the shapes of sound. They are shy, recede before touch. They are too delicate to love but like many things: pea-pods, velvet, sunrise. Try to get up early so they can enjoy it.
☁️ Eyes of a Cloud
They are lost, in the delirium after surgery, in the moon that came and went one night. I saw them when the clouds covered and uncovered the moon, and I imagined them in rowboats, rocking upon the night in the waters of the fairy tales I heard as a child. Here is the moon; now it is gone completely. Do they navigate for the clouds? Do they want to reach the moon?
Judith Serin is a creative writing and literature professor at California College of the Arts, and her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. Serin’s recent fiction collection, Gravity, debuted in May 2022 from Eye Wear Publishing. Her collection of poetry, Hiding in the World, was published by Diane di Prima’s Eidolon Editions.