The Undreamt
The
girl in our garage—a starved
ten-year-old
my wife in a dream
wrangled
out to feed and bathe—
wore
the face abandonment takes
in
a human body. Brickshorn, burnt
homes
have nothing on this wild
vacancy
of eyes, of fist-balled, nail-
raking
terror who crawled through
broken
glass to get out of the rain.
The
pines might have sheltered her
until
the wind turned, if the weed
dealer
hadn't creeped her out first.
True,
I dreamt her into being,
but
real ones live a block west,
a
mile south or on the block
where
I was first lost, where
the
streetlights were repo'ed
last
year (good luck kids,
getting
to school of a winter's morn).
I'll
name neighbors decades dead,
but
I can't summon the living ones,
the
undreamt, ubiquitous kids.
Room to Room
Only amalgams are true, he told her,
and agreeing, she stayed with him
since he drank less than her husband
and reminded her of her brothers.
For him she recalled a fourth grade
teacher, which he never told her
and only saw when she laughed
so her teeth showed and eyes
crinkled to life, though her lines
didn’t vanish into a nun's wimple
since hair ringed her face,
curling in indefinable reds.
Happy, she jarred loose thoughts
of his mom the day she'd hit
on a number. But she wept
easily—at the news, during sex,
on seeing a kid swatted
at the park. She vibrated like
a struck string when he touched
her and when he didn't.
And so they moved room
to room, lightly brushing hands,
hips, and the others
of
whom they were composed.
Michael Lauchlan's poems appear in New England Review,
Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Ninth Letter, The
Cortland Review, and Innisfree
and in two anthologies: Abandon
Automobile (Wayne State
University Press) and A Mind Apart
(Oxford University Press). He recently won the Consequence Prize for
Poetry.
