Yesterday and yesterday

She has a memory.  One beautiful memory.  Carefully held in the palm of her hands, so that no one else might find it and steal it.  She must leave it nowhere.  It must always remain with her.  The memory of that one summer morning, while they still slept.  The pavement of the driveway cool on her bare feet as she stepped into the shadow cast by the huge Mountain Ash in the front yard, the sun burning golden at the edges.  No one must have this moment.  This moment must never be touched.

Because she must hold it so close and so carefully, she cannot hold onto any others.  She lets the pictures framed in broken glass fall through her fingers.  There must only be one world.  One world, underneath the tree, where no one else exists.  Let the others sleep.  Let them all sleep.  She is a girl standing in the shadow of a golden halo.  She must never step out.  She must live here forever.

Shadows

I shivered, walked past the knives

only to be stabbed a thousand more times

Atomic rage

I surrendered my travel book centuries ago

burned the forest where you were 

my favorite tree

You are the reality I cannot close in on 

the dream I mistook for 

permanency

A World Away

The shimmering patch of air was now positively beckoning her. 

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Kitty asked out loud.  As long as she took care not to run into the cactus lurking just behind this potential hallucination, the answered seemed to be nothing, other than a few wasted moments of her life.  And it wasn’t as if Kitty had something better to do.  Her existence was so devoid of excitement that it seemed a shame to ignore even this smidgeon of potential.  So she said brightly to herself, “Well, here goes!” and feeling more than a little stupid, marched straight into the shimmering light.

Kitty felt herself gasp as a blast of frigid air blow through her—air colder than anything she’d ever experienced during a Wisconsin winter, including the January when the temperature failed to rise above zero degrees.  Just when she thought she would never feel warm again, however, the sensation passed.  And then Kitty stumbled and promptly fell down onto her knees.

Embarrassed, she stood up and brushed herself off.  At least no one had been around to see her make a fool of herself—and, more importantly, she had avoided the cactus.   Kitty didn’t even want to think what it would have felt like to fall into that.

She was still flicking bits of dirt off of her clothes, imagining herself covered in cactus needles, when she noticed a battered pair of black riding boots just a few feet in front of her.  

Kitty looked up.  A man stood in front of her.

*From my upcoming serialized YA fantasy novel, A Window to the World, coming to https://channillo.com/ soon!

            

Silence

I hear riddles all day long

words but not in English

no one wants me to know

My heart is a tinder box I

am not allowed to open

Illusions

And when I choose to come here again                                                                     

will it snow how it did in my dreams

                        will I be

a story worth telling

                                    because the sadness—

it crackles in the night

           

for you           

the mistake worth regretting

                                                the faraway voice        filled with belonging

do you see where eternity ends

did you know that you were my friend

this planet a box that holds me

when she could not worship the sun               for so long she yearned to sleep         

but the storm came rolling in

                        the storm came rolling in

a million miles of prairie grass

and your golden-haired girl                            exposed once again

unsure how the course of right became the final turn wrong

how her rabbit-hole time for falling   

                                    just      gone

gone

gone

a triumph but for you 

my one truth worth deceiving

a child’s dream for tomorrow so good           it deserved to be buried

behind the wall a red she had never seen                  

           

if I had                        discovered

yet not been found

would your golden-haired girl           

be six feet underground

I guess this was why you had to go

maybe I should have known

but the sadness—

no one told me it would come with the leaving

especially not you

my last hope worth believing

The Open Door

January 2005

Dream Journal

Dreamt I went back to school and I was in algebra class.  Unlike in my other dreams I was actually having fun, thinking I might be able to catch up and not fail the course, when suddenly one of my classmates shouted that someone had a gun.  Everyone started to scream and run.  In the hallway I saw the guy with a gun.  He was from another high school, a football player.  The room we all escaped into had a telephone, but when I dialed 911 they put me on hold.  The football player came into the room and we all ran again, panicking.

Everyone got ahead of me and went outside, in a direction they knew he wouldn’t think to follow.  I was trying to follow but suddenly I couldn’t run at all--it was massive effort to lift my feet.  The football player came outside with another guy and a girl, and they were all laughing together, like they were having fun killing people and scaring us.  I climbed a brick wall and tried to hide in a drainage ditch, but they’d seen me.  As I was climbing the wall the girl took the gun and shot me in the foot.  When I then crouched in the gutter she shot at me again and just missed my stomach.  Somehow I knew I would have died had that bullet been even half an inch closer.

Finally I managed to jump out of the gutter despite my wounded foot.  I ran through a cemetery full of huge holes in the ground, down side streets, even through people’s houses, as I followed signs to a road that I knew would lead me home.  But when I reached the road I looked over, and the girl with the gun was walking alongside me.  She seemed very queer and scary.  Although she wasn’t holding the gun I knew she was still dangerous.  I tried to pacify her with small talk. 

When we reached my house I managed to go down to the basement without her.  Although people were home no one in the house was helping me.  I grabbed the phone in my brother’s room and called the police, but the police wouldn’t let me tell them what was going on.  They just kept blathering on about how they knew the shooting had taken place and they were looking for the suspect.  I couldn’t get a word in edgewise to tell them the suspect was in my house! 

Then all at once the girl was standing in the doorway to my brother’s room. She accused me of calling the police.  I shook my head and tried to say things into the phone that made it sound like I was just having some random phone call.  She obviously didn’t believe me.  In a somber tone, she told me, “Think of all the lives you’re going to ruin.”