Ghost Arm (really short fiction)

She woke up curled on her side as usual, eyes heavy and hair tangled. The light through the curtains was dim like early morning or a cloudy afternoon, time had no meaning in the stringy moments before movement and memory. At once she became aware of the arm beside her in bed, a long tube of flesh lying along the length of her body. Her own arm, she knew, must be beneath her: thhis was not her arm. Carefully she turned her head on the rumpled pillow to see who else was in her bed. Had there been someone there when she had gone to sleep? Had someone joined her in the night? As usual, there was no one lying beside her in the single bed.
Finally she prodded the arm with her hand, watching the finger indent in the still skin. She felt nothing. Grasping the limb and levering it upward, she found it attached to her shoulder and felt the terrifying weight as it flopped back down, numb and dead. At last a rational thought crept into her mind: this was going to hurt. She rolled on to her back in her empty bed and closed her eyes, hoping to fall asleep before the prickling pain set in.

Decaf

You've always loved coffee,
late night coffee, dripped hot
from gaping plastic pots.
I watched you drink cup after cup

peeling back creamer lids,
emptying sugar packets
one by one so wild eyed,
unwilling to miss a single moment.

Around you I stayed wide awake without caffiene,
that thin brown dream,
desire the buzz unrecognized.
My hands kept stealing back to wrap around
the warm porcelain of your mug, how I wanted that sweetness

beside me, we watched night
peeling back into day.

I drink coffee now,
I want to be drinking it with you.

Teaching Poem

I want to learn to make coffee
and drive a stick-shift car,
see clouds without sunglasses
and make mashed potato volcanoes.

I want to tear bread with my teeth,
make snowflakes from scrap paper,
taking care to fall into bed each night
white-lipped with exhaustion and
filthy with freckles.

I want to gag on salt water because I am swimming in the sea.

Each day in the years since I learned to walk upright
I have forced my feet into shoes.
But I will not put away childish things.