Dreams: Lyn Lifshin

BAD DREAM

the night was hard work, dreaming,
the strangers in the house
stain the air. I was going to be
abandoned. I could tell and finding
my crystal beads tossed on the
floor, apt to be cracked, turned to
rose dust didn’t help. Or the man who
seems an intrusion stinking up the
bathroom. Before I slept, I was
appalled I had forgotten my Abyssinian
cat’s birthday two days ago though
I remember it was the date Harper and
Row took my book. Was I the cat,
abandoned in my Sunday depression
though I always remember my cat before
her died Feb 11, 2002. The guests
seem oblivious to me, they are cocky,
the singy, touching types. I wanted out,
to get out before I was abandoned.
Then I wake up shaking, horrified thinking
it’s never been so long since I talked
with my mother. And then, like the
man with Alzheimer’s, going thru his
daughter’s death each time he sees
her in her coffin, remembering, awake
I can’t go to see my mother,
she’s dead

#

DREAM OF NEEDING SPACE, OF THINGS CAUGHT FROZEN

fast shots of a dancer
in muted clothes
shooting thru space
needing a lot of space
around the greys and
guavas nothing
red Gitana's favorite
color nothing bright
as blood but muted
colors frozen in a
cube of glass every
thing suspended it
can't grow or die
What I say is caught
in ice that won't melt

#

LUST BLOWING UNDER THE DOOR, BRIGHT AS STRAW

Your smile’s like sun
flowers he said
as tho
embarrassed his
hands were
pressing
awkwardly the
ring on his
second finger
close to her
eyes
from that room
a wheat sea
lust
blew under the
door bright
as straw
and his warm
parts on
her belly
those small
bones that changed her
small
bones to water
And not even
knowing
his name
until later
when the floor fell
the room
turned into a
painting
and the paint cracked

#


BAD DREAM # 279, JUNE 22

I go back to Vermont, to Middlebury.
It’s been a while, another life time?
And the uncles, the dead ones hover
in shadows, ghostly, their lips and
cheek bones on faces that some
how aren’t there but then, nothing is
as it was. The beautiful bookstore
with the flat above it where I dreamed
in my lavender back bedroom of
starring on Broadway or writing a book,
now looks like collapsing bricks about
to be bull dozed. This can’t be. There’s
no bookstore, no sign there’s ever
been one. The bricks shift, the building
looks like something too dangerous
to enter after a hurricane, a house of
tooth picks one small breath could
make fall down. Even Main Street, a
perfect New England small town
where Life magazine came to photo
graph this perfect calendar frame, the
red and green lights strung for Christmas,
children on sleds and of course the traffic
police who checked out every boy who
came to pick me up for a date my
mother would wait up for me from.
Have I been comatose a hundred years?
Where is the town I knew? What could
be left but mice and droppings in the
mostly abandoned street. Drug vials litter
the street instead of flower boxes and
geranium. When did the town become
a slum, a torn blighted disaster? The
only color is gray. It’s as if the mortar,
whatever held all that mattered together
dissolved. A heart beat. Just the touch
of one brick and everything I thought I
could keep will crumble

#

BALLROOM

I want to be
air and flame,
my arms wings,
my feet beating
the ground
for take off.
I want the
grind, the
shimmer of his
pelvis, my
skirt flaming,
want him to
hold me in a
frame nothing
wild escapes from

Dreams: Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

THE BOOK OF ABSURD DREAMS

The bird of wisdom carries the words
I speak in my sleep
across the sea,
who recite the words to a man who looks like me.

My double takes my words to his grave.
They become a book
in his coffin.

My double’s corpse is ravaged by worms.
One of the worms ends
up in a bird’s gut.
This bird flies across the sea reciting the words

from the book of
my double’s corpse.
I dream of the absurdity of such a book.

Dreams: Craig Sernotti

DREAM

I took a shit in a toilet
that couldn’t flush.
Didn’t know it was broken
at the time.
I had to shovel it out with a
toothpick and rubber gloves.
Everyone pointed and laughed.
I flung a log at them.
They ran away.
I finished cleaning out the bowl.
John Updike said I did a good job.
I shook his hand,
then removed the gloves.

Dreams: Kurt Newton

waiting for the crash to happen

rainy gray
drive to work
wipers slide
a soothing metronome
ahead the white lines
wave and blur
as heavy shadows
red tail lights
diffuse behind
the foggy window
coffin cool

you could be sitting at home
in your favorite chair
dozing off to your favorite
late night television program
as the world beyond
your four white walls
battles distant wars
spills distant blood
and crumbles

or you could be in your bed
your body numbed and tired
wrapped inside
your bleached white sheets
as your mind escapes
to distant lands
and falls in love
with strangers

or you could be in your car
as rocket shells explode around you
and your lover turns out to be
the figure on the dash
and the TV screen transcends
into a thousand starlit pieces
and you close your eyes
but there is no sleep
because your dream has continued on
without you

- first appeared in Asylums and Labyrinths (1997)

Dreams: Howie Good

A DREAM

The chair was tilted back. My mouth was open.
He reached in with a pair of pliers.
They were the pliers from my household toolbox.
I became aware of music, something classical,
playing discreetly in the background
The tooth was stubborn. He grunted as he yanked at it.
I wondered why I was there, what I had done.
In the outer office, voices were arguing.
He yanked harder. Sweat dripped down his face.
I looked at the brown stains on the ceiling
to avoid looking further at him.
We stayed like that for hours, perhaps days.
It got so bad that even the birds,
with their wild, tiny hearts, flew away.

Dreams: Puma Pearl

mrs. god’s kitchen

mrs. god was tired of the kitchen
every day was the same
the red and yellow checked cloth
hung just so around the small round table
lenny bruce cracking tired jokes, eating
strawberry pie with whipped cream
janis singing endlessly to jim morrison
his eyes burning holes in the linoleum as
he sliced bananas into crescent moons,
sprinkled them over fruity frosted flakes

mrs. god was tired of staying home
her husband had all the good times
directing traffic, finding parking spaces
bailing junkies out of drug busts
granting wishes, fervent dreams
home runs, negative pregnancy tests
found keys, cell phone messages
good haircuts, matched socks
empty laundromats, exact change
answering the most popular prayers
bringing smiles and sighs to believers

mrs. god was tired of the weather
seventy- eight degrees and sunny
every single gosh darned night
she was tired of floating weightlessly
as she stirred pots and tossed dishes into
rainwater mixed with tide and bleach alternative
she was tired of disheveled rock stars
sarcastic comedians, revolutionary heroes
nancy spungeon’s voice, che guevara’s eyes
she hitched a ride one night with jerry garcia
they ate ice cream with the big dipper and the little one
even god couldn’t find her for awhile
he had to stay home and cook and entertain
nobody seemed to really notice he was gone

Dreams: David Lawrence

I’M NOT DREAMING

In this dream where contours are outlines of edgy behavior and hallucinations are meager shakings from the salt of parched reality I am not dreaming.

My life travels in front of me like a cloud in which words are kites posted with hieroglyphics of my failures.

I tell you its not a dream. But you aren’t there to catch my drift. I think of the drift of a boat at sea and snow falling at Vail when I was young and still could afford to ski.

It’s not that I fail to remember my night time dreams but that my dreams want nothing to do with me. They disappear into their own glamorous world of retrocession and ignore me because I am too soaked in reality like a self-immolating wick.

At night my mind is vacant and stripped of dreams. During the day I wander around like a discarded image and hang onto a mirage that is burying its camels in an oasis of sand.

#

COUGHING DREAMS

I choked on a dream.
I lit your cigarette in the hope that you’d die.

I couldn’t remember an image
Except you burning in your sheets throwing
Matches at me.

This was a nightmare.
Or was it?
I didn’t know you or the dream.

I was full of negative hallucinations.
My lungs couldn’t take it all in and my sinuses
Dripped bizarre antagonisms.

Dreams: David McLean

the body

the body is so obvious
and it needs memories
to be its meat, it needs
dreams and nightmares
so it can listen to the fingers
of the rain scratching dead
at the window

this evident body is me
though evidently it is not me
and it is poisoned deliberately
by each insolent minute,
by every second that piles
its eternity in me,
by each torture
floating in the blood,
by the coffin floating
thoughtlessly through our need,
by each forgotten drug

the body listens to the fingers
of the wind, they scratch at the window
like fingers clawing at a coffin lid,
like a thirsty corpse the wind sings

the body is a meaty machine full of dreams
full of devils and dead men,
we are children falling asleep
where only nightmares are still listening,
life is a dream and it's impossible to wake from

Dreams: John Kuligowski

AN OCEAN LAY NAKED

To dream of the sea is to dream
of the salt in your blood,
and yesterday afternoon an
ocean lay naked, stretched before me.
I saw a seagull’s abstract eye reflect
the shape of a woman foundering in the water
her wet hair shaking against the curve
of her spine, sensuous as the smoke
from a stick of incense curling unhurriedly
to the vaulted heights of a mystery temple.
I lost something in the water,
the breakers crashing against illumination.
To know the salt in your blood is to see
a particular of the cosmos
cut from motion
whole in itself
the seagull’s eye peering down,
detached from the carrion eater dressed
in rags of vestal white.
Picking at the ocean’s dream, you see
yourself, finally, equanimity
faltering, nothing sacrificed to you
for what was lost.