by Bernadette Geyer
I waited for the sunrise with J____, having spent the night popping chocolate-covered coffee beans and talking about the meaning of life with our scant knowledge of it except for how exciting it was to bid adieu to the twilight from the roof of a building on campus. Now, I wake before my husband and daughter, wait for the coffee to brew, watch the sky turn lighter shades of indigo until the cross on the Friedenskirche next door becomes radiant in the reflected light of an average morning, clouds streaking and striating to art the horizon. It’s still worth it, thirty years on, to experience the transformation from night to day, even if I am only talking about the meaning of life to myself, or the cat, while the rest of my little world sleeps on, dreaming in potentialities, every possibility a cloud in our peripheral vision that changes form as we turn to watch it, shaped and reshaped by forces over which there is no control.
Bernadette Geyer is a writer living in Berlin, Germany. Her second full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from April Gloaming Publishing in October 2025. Poems and essays have recently appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, South Dakota Review, Salamander, Gargoyle, and elsewhere.
Emerge Literary Journal 