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2026 Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize (Graduate Award)
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Nocturne
by Jason Germaine Hawkins
back to University & College Poetry Prizes
![Nocturne In this space between vision and visceral reenactment, I am myself and watching myself. I don’t want to scatter my attention: the intention has always been to take everything at once: a plane mirror as generous as the sky: the eye that never, never rests: its rapid movement an aspect of my vigilance: both the real image and the virtual imagination. I remember: Do not mistake this for scattering: I am here: It is everything else that breaks: that comes and goes: there are no terms to describe an animal that never rests. Scientifically, restlessness does not exist —only sleep, torpor, hibernation, estivation. One night, after prayer, Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my Soul to keep; If I should die before I 'wake, I pray the Lord my Soul to take. I questioned the logic of God’s omniscience. My mother could only say that He never, never rests, and so I lay with my body in a fist, hoping it would bring me next to Him. There were so many things I needed to know. Like a tree felled— the body: my adversary and axeman —I cracked the shell of sleep: touched the yolk of nightmare. I knew that the darkness did not rest, so how could I? In that space between vision and visceral reenactment, I was prey to the subconscious mind: I endeavored to stay conscious: I crept downstairs at all hours of the night. In the broad-shouldered chair, always awake, sat my father, reflecting in his eyes the hard light and cracked blue shadows of a flickering 60” television. The few times I did catch him sleeping, he woke at the slightest footfall: hands up, half cradling himself: half poised to strike. It took him several moments to unscatter. When the terrors threatened to swallow me whole, I slept in the same bed as my mother. Most nights, I woke in cold sweats, face down, trembling, and wishing to be free from the terrible loneliness of sleep: Are you awake? And every single time: Yes. I’m here. One night: she took her sleeping pills with wine and told me to remember the prayer. I read that what I describe as my “restlessness” constitutes severe sleep deprivation, but I have been afraid that it is sleep that deprives me. I remember: the day I napped for the first time in two years. I woke to my phone, face down, trembling furiously against my nightstand. My mom called to tell me my shadow had died— I had a paper due that night: my upstairs neighbors (a couple) were fighting, spewing hurt, cracking and smashing the quiet: I took everything in order to not scatter— I remembered classical school, where I learned that Death and Sleep were twin brothers: bound by a wreath of poppies, cradled in the arms of their mother, the Night— and at home, I learned the history of Black people murdered in their sleep: Harry T. and Harriet Moore: their home in Mims bombed on Christmas night: their wedding anniversary: Fred Hampton: drugged with barbiturates: the primary sleep aid of the era: before ninety bullets were fired into his apartment: and then one more to his head as he lay in bed, never fully conscious: a straight shot down S Western Ave and then a right: my grandmother’s house on S Elizabeth Street: Deborah Johnson said: He never got up off the bed. Further back, in Mississippi: the Night Doctors. The elder held the stories in her body like a fist: They would poison us. Steal us from our beds and our graves: enslaved, runaway, free, didn’t really matter. Carve us up like chickens on steel tables. Somebody violated like that can never, never rest. They did it all over. In Georgia, too. That’s what you hearing at night. That’s why you can’t sleep: nine thousand bones excavated in Augusta: Medical experimentation material— and I was watching myself on a first date. He told me he fell asleep watching a film I loved. I cradled myself against disassembly into the canyon of cold air between us and said that I couldn’t remember when I last fell asleep watching —really watching— anything, couldn’t even imagine it the way most can’t imagine falling asleep while eating or running. I said: I am just so afraid of missing something. —and I remembered the Night it got so bad that it sounded like he was killing her: The house’s erratic heartbeat finding echo in the floor and the walls, the voice Fuck you! You want to hit me? Make me bleed? [You think you’re so innocent?!] [You think you don’t do shit wrong?!] [Get the fuck out of my face!] [Spit in my face again.] Jordan—! calling out for my sister, who never came. The terrible flatline that took everything: I took everything, even the silences: and even after the cops came and went, I couldn’t sleep the whole night. I couldn’t. I was just so afraid— and I remember when I was stranded in England alone—everyone else had a morning flight: I awoke, and they had gone—and I was so afraid I didn’t sleep for forty-eight hours straight, not in the cramped easyHotel room, barely a blink on the plane back, and I didn’t even feel tired until I crumbled into my own bed and slept from ten to twelve the next day—a broad black panel in the woolen tapestry of my memory: the longest I’ve ever slept in my life—but I awoke with this awful dizziness, this impression that I’d missed heat death and risen amid a cemetery of stellar remnants —black dwarfs, black holes: fundamentally invisible, more restless and titanic than the singularity of my fatigue— that I should’ve been outside, eyes wide open, watching the stars turn, turn, and die: those eyes that never, never rest and seem to say: I am here.](/sites/default/files/inline-images/Jason%20Germaine%20Hawkins.png)