Poetry
15.1 / SPRING / SUMMER 2020

Dream Interpretation

 

If you dream of an elevator going sideways on a rusty cable
this means you are working against yourself. If it crashes
and you survive you will be blessed with a clairvoyant gift
that only works in the state of Utah every other Monday.
If it does not crash this means you’ll arrive soon to the place
where you have finally learned to listen to yourself, which will
bore you. If you dream that you murder all of your sisters,
a countless number of sisters, then it depends: a knife means
you’re terminally bitter, a sword means the same thing but
you think this a dignified death, a gun means you wish
you were a bird, and your bare hands mean that you spend
too much time alone thinking about women. If your sisters
are young then you are old and if they are old then you are old.
If you dream of a birthday party ruined by your mobster father
then it is time for a new perspective on what existence means
to you—maybe before it meant cinnamon and now it’ll mean
pepper or maybe it meant floating a river and now it’ll mean
being lost in a sandstorm but sand so small it feels like velvet
on your skin or maybe it meant nothing but now it’ll mean
nothing as in absence, as in some thing used to be there and now
is more there in the void of it, like the dripping grin of twilight
or the impression of a head on the pillow hours into the morning.

 

Isabelle Correa writes fiction and poetry. Her writing can be found in Third Point Press, Trampset, Maudlin House, Kanstellation and is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys. She’s from Washington on the east side of The Cascades and lives and teaches in Vietnam. Follow her on Twitter @IsabelleJCorrea.

 

*[this author uses a pseudonym]

 


15.1 / SPRING / SUMMER 2020

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE