From the Collection Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments

So, I thought,
as the door was unlocked
and the landlord disappeared (no,
he actually disappeared)
and I got to examine
the room unobserved.
There it stood
in its gray corner—
the narrow bed, the sheets
the color of old aspirin.
Maybe all this had happened
somewhere inside me
already,
or was just about to.
Is there even a difference?
Familiar,
familiar but not
yet remembered . . .
The little narrow bed.
I had often wondered
where I would find it,
it find me, or
what it would look like.
Don’t you?
It was so awful
I couldn’t speak. Then
maybe you ought to lie down for a minute, I heard myself
thinking. I mean
if you are having that much trouble
functioning. And when
was the last time
with genuine sorrow
and longing to change
you got on your knees?
I could get some work done
here, I shrugged;
I had done it before.
I would work without cease.
Oh, I would stay awake
if only from horror
at the thought of waking
up here. Ma,
a voice spoke from the darkness
in the back seat
where a long thin man lay
his arms crossed
on his chest,
while they cruised slowly up and down
straining to make out the numbers
over unlighted doors,
the midnight doctor’s;
in his hurt mind
he was already merging
with a black Mississippi
of mercy, the sweat pouring off him
as though he’d been doused
with a bucket of ice water
as he lay sleeping. “I saw the light,”
they kept screaming. “Do
‘I Saw the Light’!”
Ma—there ain’t no light.
I don’t see no light.

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Excerpted from Axe In Blossom by Franz Wright. Published July 2026 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.