The House at the End of the Evening
Amy Laessle-Morgan
@ultramarine_poetry

She leaves the faucet running — always —
because silence frightens her more than the flood,
for water knows nothing of restraint.

It seeps into the seams, into the floorboards, inside the meat of the house,
until the carpets are soaked through with time or blood — or both —
and nobody seems to notice the two brothers
who come to visit her each night.

They never arrive together.
One always follows the other.
Not arm in arm,
but always pulling from the same wound.

She draws the curtain,
but the light still manages to get in —
thin and grey and not quite morning.

The soft one — Sleep —
always knocks.
He makes her a bed of swan feathers and small lies,
promises she will wake before the world remembers her absence.

She likes him best when she’s tired,
when she’s picking out shrapnel from the wreckage of memory,
when the weight of remembering sinks her into the mattress.
He never asks questions —
just dims the room,
tracing her collarbone to her temple with fingers made of dusk.

But the cold one — Death —
he waits.
Always at the foot of the bed.
Polite — patient — familiar.
Touching nothing.
Changing nothing.
He watches her sleep.
He watches her wake.

Neither speaks of love.
But she feels it —
in the way they wait for her,

in how Sleep softens her edges,
and how Death
names the emptiness without words.

She begins to confuse their footsteps.
Sometimes Sleep leaves the room colder than he entered.
Sometimes Death tucks her in so gently,
she mistakes him for Sleep.

She walks backward into herself,
like Eurydice with a mouth full of silence,
her hand reaching for something warm —
a light, a voice, the edge of morning.
But the stairs always crumble behind her.
Sleep weeps like a child.
Death waits with flowers,
fresh from Sunday’s funeral procession.

And the brothers —
still waiting —
like suitors too late for the dance,
offer her nothing
but the courtesy
of never arriving together.

 Amy Laessle-Morgan is a poet based in Southeast Michigan. Her work has appeared in Gypsophila Art & Literary Magazine, Sterling Script, Poetic Reveries Magazine, Artifex Literary Magazine, Squirrel Cane Press, and Azarão Lit Journal. She is also the author of East Coast Heartbreak, a debut poetry collection. When she’s not writing, she enjoys photography, traveling, and playing bass guitar — not very well, but with feeling. You can find her work on Instagram @ultramarine_poetry.