In my dream I stick a toe in water. In my bed a leg smarts me awake.
2
Even worse than Frozen Dream is Mummy Dream; even worse than Mummy Dream is Choking Dream; and even worse than that is gagging on saliva, legs in a sheet straight, the stungun of 2 a.m.
3
Your trick: a box of chocolates and a mystery so when waking arrives early, you will have something to do while waiting for the sugar to spike you back down.
4
The spies creep from nest to nest with shoulder bags stealing feathers while the geese out gallivant— Upon returning they think nothing of it, simply tear out all the down again, re-cushioning the nests. Sometimes, in the first light, skeletons stick me through the sheets.
5
Sleep is like a pillow on my mouth and dawn is the surgeon's knife.
6
My heart is blank like a San Francisco summer, sky holding like a scared cat, like a lit screen running no film— I stay like this for hours.
7
You couldn't have painted it more real than the news replay, replay, making crash a fresco on my wet gray brain.
8
My eyes tear up morning after morning, rejecting air, waking, the flood that washes the dam sleep made just hours before. The doctor says I need to blink more.
9
I didn't have time for coffee and now the desperate lack it normally contains, like a spill, has stolen my wings.
10
Windows is still booting while the receptionist cooks oatmeal in a cup, opens her Russian I-only-know-is Harlequin by the muscular embrace of (her hand on) its cover.
11
Why can't I have you now, when I want you— Why do I want you, now more than ever?
12
Surveys say take a lunch! and in that lunch you don't have to eat but you must do something other. I say, No.
13
You can count apples and oranges income and outcomes but you can't count on fingers and toes how many times you break me; bottle on beach rocks; sea glass.
14
The only Carpal Tunnel I'll ever have is the runway to your soul.
15
There is no hour I want to trade more than 3 p.m.; I'd give you seven dollars to take it off my hands; I'd sit in church until it passed like I used to, keeping Jesus company during the holiest of Holy Hours, singing (that's twice praying) all the missal songs in my head.
16
I sift hours into minutes like the sand we'll walk on in one-and-a-half, you, a set of footprints ahead.
17
When you give that look I salivate in the least likely place, my light switch mind turning on. Pavlov was right about a lot of things.
18
I won't find a starfish but I might find a cracked half sand dollar. I won't find a phosphorescent anemone, but I might find one, algae-cleaved. I may never find you but I will find sea glass the hue and glitter of your eyes.
19
Tonight, as a gift, five planets will align themselves 11 to 5 o'clock across the sky with the moon on top like a valance.
Windows by Leslie Marcus
My little window full of lights through branches a hundred moons! none of which are you.
21
Insomnia is better than Copperfield, who can do lots but not disappear night before your very eyes.
22
Once, in Honors English, Sr. Marlene interrupted Brave New World to explain the gyre.
23
I'm supposed to affirm my enough-ness each night an undulating mantra like my body mounting yours but even then I grow and grow to fill you; widening, widening.
24
My fingers lace your ribs like a corset, holding. I have to go now, but I don't.
-Lynn EmanuelEven my longing to be gone from here is gone from here.