that gave me nightmares
or maybe it was the giant hole
in the logic of importing butter
from New Zealand
or the giant hole in the ozone—
wait, isn’t that healing? Didn’t we do
one thing right? I don’t miss hairspray.
Or maybe it was the giant gap
between me and the suffering
and yet I am still suffering,
still count myself among them,
paper cuts versus daggers
Richard C. Owens | ANIMA
My reflection fades and distorts in the fogged damp
of double-panes, hanging against a fading, ice-blue
afternoon. Beyond the window frost coats trees
and stones not yet snow-smothered. It’s a ghostly world,
dead as the moon.
Colleen Russett | PHANTASM
Experiment
as you like: on your back
circled by vultures, your hands muffled
by your pillow. Still,
every night, senseless ocean worries over
the little deaths that
fold themselves
inside the big one.
Debra Bennett | THROAT SONGS AT MIDNIGHT
Throat songs at midnight light
swing wavering sharp, land
soft as shrouds
rise again and again
eternal as rock echoes
eternal as ghost kisses
Guy Elston | THE DREAM HISTORIAN’S DREAM
At an average of five a night
that’s over 300 million daily in Late Antiquity
alone, or the Mediterranean Pagan-Christian
Intermediary Period, as my department
Was last rebranded. Funding cut.
Break the seal, play on double fast-forward,
salient images only pause on, note
and if typical stamp TYPICAL
Rose Cullis | A NIGHTMARE IS A WEASEL
that gets in and kills every last one, that fastens
on what it finds there and leaves a gory mess, yes
a nightmare is being trapped with its slippery
muscular intention and the means to do it
to smell the rancid Mustelid before it
weasels triumphant through a small wire hole
Tanis MacDonald | BESIDE
A stutter-self, a shadow without edge,
a last echo, mitochondrial must,
every question I don’t want knowledge
of or an answer to. What lives in dust
Ellie Chartier | THE BEDROOM
I don’t dream anymore.
Since I moved into this house,
My sleep is deep as the sea.
Catherine Graham | LAST SHADOW
Flying only happens in dreams.
No one sees the moon-chord
direct the dead through the underground
or bones grip roots.
We lengthen as herons mid-air.
Our past melts yellow for the day’s heat cradle.