Geri Doran

The Republic of Sleep

Nothing transpires in the borderless country of night.
Each hour a vanishing. Each breath a pink-grey bloom
of rose campion, closing.

This advent of nothing is a communal unknowing.
Each one of us exhaling the workday, the rule.
Each of us hiring a tiny rickshaw of dreams.

Geri Doran is the author of Epistle, Osprey (Tupelo, 2019), Sanderlings (Tupelo, 2011), and Resin (LSU, 2005). Her work has received the Walt Whitman Award, Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and Stegner Fellowship. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.