SLEIGH BED Visiting Emily Dickinsons home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

After days divided into increments of grocery lists, poetry and baking bread, weary and delighted, you slip into your dark wood single bed and feel soft linens against your skin. Did you exchange hungry kisses with Judge Otis P. Lord on that bed? Or, was it sacred space where only dreams and poems were wed? Harvard looted everything of yours except this sleigh bed, its head and foot boards slanting outward, where you lay listening and let the hodgepodge of eternity in.

~ Barbara Alfaro