Cover of The Ocean in the Next Room (2025) | Sarah V. Schweig / Milkweed Editions
I’m still here in the city I entered years ago.
I’ve been in the city all this time.
I don’t look up and around much anymore.
I’ve been studying philosophy and having a son
and killing time. I follow my son from room
to room in our two-room rental. While he sleeps,
I kill a roach in the bathroom with a broom,
and even thoroughly crushed its legs keep
moving. I get up each morning still asleep
and keep moving. I’ve been in the city all this time
telling myself: You are living your life.
Years went by that I didn’t notice the sky
until I glimpsed the sky in the stream of images
I thumb through from time to time. One time,
the algorithm fed me a blue house on a distant coast,
which I now cannot find. It had two bedrooms,
a yard, two decks, an unthinkable sunroom.
These days the sun burns itself out by late afternoon.
I follow my son, trying to deserve him.
In my dreams recently, birds land on my table
and die. In the stream of images, a man feeds
a mouse with a tiny spoon. Is the world this stream
of images or the trashed city I push my son through?
I’ve been in the city all this time, trying.
Philosophy has not prepared me. Philosophy asks:
How do I know if you’re in pain?
These days, I look at my son and feel the terror
of love. And then I don’t feel a thing.
“The Blue House” in The Ocean in the Next Room (2025) by Sarah V. Schweig. Published by Milkweed Editions. Copyright © 2025 Sarah V. Schweig. Published with permission from Milkweed Editions.
Click here to read Sarah V. Schweig in conversation with Carina Filemyr on The Ocean in the Next Room, grappling with the inscrutable, and collective truth seeking.
