Sunsets and Silencers

"The Trouble with Dream Interpretation" and "Words for This" by Jenn Monroe

THE TROUBLE WITH DREAM INTERPRETATION

Waking

I take the gray feather from my hand, jay-marked but monochrome,
large as my palm, curved pinkie to thumb. It explodes into a stalk of corn
then drifts its lightest self into wind. The wound had been with me
a long time and began to fester. I worked the infection out, left a clean,
deep hole. About to find something to cover it, someone asked, how
did you get that feather in your hand anyway? But the physics of the thing
aren't important: how it got there, how I pulled it out, that fauna to flora
exchange. A shapeless voice noticed the obvious and interesting
inside me, beneath the wound. How does one ignore a thing like that?

Barley, Wheat or Rye

There is this little wall I'm trying to get around, over,
through. It seems a simple construction, just some rocks
from the field stacked with no mortar, no mud, yet
every time I approach, it gets higher, longer, thicker. I can't see
it as door or window. So I close my eyes and find the other side
remarkably like the one I just left, but brighter in greens and gold,
shifting and swaying with more ease and pleasure. No one owns this
field -- either side -- no livestock, only me. Is this my fabled city?
A field of grains I can't identify but love nonetheless?

To Breton from a Twentieth Century Love

I'm in love with this idea of love and what it means
to love without being in love. It holds me, comfortable,
an oversized leather wing-backed chair. Love is love
is love, and why not as much as you can while you can?
Love here does not equal sex and is deeper than lust -- yes,
hearts expand across decades. You are an un-definable unnamed
part of me, close as a twin, a tragedy-free love. Perhaps you
can take the feather from my hand and interpret its change.

WORDS FOR THIS

Tipsy on elderberry wine, I speak hope like junco-scattered thistle
in rare, raw moments of vulnerability. But it comes down to love,
and like the dog I can't make you understand. Wide green eyes,
heart beating right through pupils, that first look, or the last
before surrender to dreams inseparable from waking. I surrender
to the weight of words pressed into my wrists, my right shoulder --
then nothing. I beg just this, just this, watch orange lights strobe
through orange curtains again and again, think nothing, think
everything -- Where is the voice that filled my head with poetry?
Said what color is it when I meant what is the temperature?

Jenn Monroe is a poet of love in all its forms and an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Chester College of New England in New Hampshire. Her work has appeared most recently in Naugatuck River Review and Bent Pin.