Burn Lines

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Some moments don’t leave—they settle in the sheets, in the air, in the quiet just before morning.

Burn Lines stays in that thin space between dreaming and waking, where something felt close, then slipped away. It doesn’t tell what happened. It holds what’s left: the warmth that hasn’t yet lifted, a crease in the fabric, a silence that feels full. The poem lingers after the moment is gone.

It inhabits where memory and forgetting bleed into one another. What remains is not a story, but an echo—the warmth in the sheets, the outline of something felt but never fully seen.

The Poem: Burn Lines

By Kerry Ann Wiley

Heat lingers.
Linens bear the weight of night,
skin still salted.
Knees drawn close.
A dream of water—
its surface folding
like creased glass.

Something murmurs under the skin—
just pressure.
No border between sleep.
A hand held—
too cold.
A smile,
automatic.

Fabric remembers
what the sleeper does not:
the twisting,
the half-formed names
mouthed into cotton.
A face
half-lit,
not peaceful—
but paused.

Waking comes.
Nothing bleeds,
but everything bruises—
each blink in the dream
a thunderclap,
somewhere
far too close.
The body shifts.

The light has changed.
The room leans.
The sheet
peels from the spine
like regret.
The warmth
of being
almost known,
revealing lines
not written,
but burned.
The sheets are colder now.

The clock insists
on a time
that can’t be trusted.
No sound,
only
the fabric
settling
where warmth once held.
A trace of heat,
not flame—
just the memory
of skin pressed close.
Some marks
aren’t meant to fade.

Between What Was and What Remains

The poem opens inside a moment that has already begun to slip.

The room holds onto the shape of night—sheets creased, air close, dreams unfinished. The first lines set the tone: time has shifted.

Burn Lines moves through fragments: gestures, small dis-orientations, half-spoken names. The lines unfold as if remembered in pieces, not constructed. Meaning emerges through repetition, sensation, and subtle change.

A clock tells a time that can’t be trusted. Light falls differently. The room leans. These details are not symbols. They’re conditions. Each line stays close to a single moment. Something was near—then it wasn’t.

All that is left is a faint outline, a residue that seeps into the language’s flow and mood, leaving behind a quiet suggestion of what once approached but never stayed. The dream folds, rather than fades. The sheet peels from the spine like regret.

Heat is not a flame, but a trace. There is always a trace—of a gesture, of temperature, of something not fully resolved. Even silence becomes part of the imprint: the fabric settling where warmth once held.

Burn Lines is strongest when it stays close to the details. The language moves carefully, staying within the limits of each moment.

Letting the Quiet Speak

The poem leaves the uncertain untouched. Something was near, then gone, and the room never quite returns to what it was. Burn Lines ends by dwelling on what remains rather than what is lost.

It doesn’t define the moment but traces what lingers—creases, warmth, silence. Rather than filling the space, the poem holds it open, letting the quiet aftermath register.

It stays near what was almost there, letting it remain unsettled, carried by detail. What if the weight of experience lies not in presence, but in its refusal to finish or settle?

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