Karen Harryman
Distraction
I need sleep, the sleep we'd sleep
if we were all line workers at a sleep factory or
drove sleep trucks or if our daddies were sleep
doctors or our bodies were made up mostly
of sleep instead of water, the kind of sleep
I slept when I was a kid and could sleep anywhere
like the upholstered shelf inside the rear windshield
of our Buick driving through
Nebraska when the truckers would
honk and I'd sleep through their horns
and the lights of Lincoln and all the other
towns until we got where we were going
which maybe would be better
than where we had been.
Bio
Karen Harryman's work has appeared in Raleigh Review, Atticus Review, Alaska Quarterly, Verse Daily, North American Review and The Cortland Review among others. Her first book, Auto Mechanic's Daughter, was selected by Chris Abani in 2007 for the Black Goat Series Imprint at Akashic Books in Brooklyn. She lives and writes in Los Angeles where she is raising two daughters and reading submissions for Los Angeles Review and the Alice James Award in her spare time. Before moving to Los Angeles, she lived in Kentucky for most of her life.