Where You Go When She Sleeps

By Sarah Portner

I really liked the idea behind this piece. I like how the author, in the start of his poem, goes into such detail of how he has fallen for this girl and then compares it to a small boy falling into a silo of grain. It fascinated me that he would compare two things that are so drastically different from each other; love and death. How he has fallen so deeply in love with this woman, comparing her hair to that of sun, or metal, or grain, that he is trapped and cannot escape this love, nor does he want too. To a boy looking at the swirling golden flakes of grain, that he falls in, which leads to his death. This too, the small boy cannot escape. I thought it was brilliant that love and death could simultaneously be one in the same poem and mean two different things. "But a whirling of sunlight and water and air full of shining dust/That takes you, a dream that is not of you but will let you/Into itself if you love enough, and will not, will never let you go."