SAM'S DREAM

ART TK

Roula Nassar, the escape dream, 2018, color pencil on paper, 24 x 19 inches.

ATONEMENT

JENNY GEORGE

I stood in a lamplit kitchen looking into my empty life. Outside, moths grazed the windowscreens like tiny winged horses.

I had lived so close to my life I could almost feel it: it hummed like an electric fence. Often I had been afraid, standing motionless at the dark border.

Forgive me, I sang to the life. How beautiful, how painful you almost were, I sang with my burning inaudible voice.

SAM'S DREAM

JORIE GRAHAM

One day there is no day because there is no day before, no yesterday, then a now, & time, & a cell divides and you, you are in time, time is in you, as multiplying now u slip into our stream, or is it u grow a piece of stream in us, is it flesh or time you grow, how, is it an American you grow, week 28, when we are told dreaming begins. Welcome. Truest stranger. Perhaps one of the last conceived & carried in womb. Father and mother singular and known. Born of human body. Not among the perfected ones yet. No. A

mere human, all first hand knowledge, flying in as if kindling—natural. The last breath before the first breath is mystery. Then u burn into gaze, thought, knowledge of oblivion. Rock yourself. Kick so I can feel you out here. Push your hands against the chamber. The world is exhausted. I moisten my lips and try to remember a song. I have to have a song to sing you from out here. They say you now hear vividly. This could have been a paradise my song begins. No, this is, was, is, never will be again, will be, we hope

desperately wasn’t a dream, maybe in your dream now there is a clue, can you dream the clue, you who are dreaming what having had no life to dream of,