POETRY
Recurring Dreams
I.
I hear my father’s footsteps coming closer.
I can’t drive, but I’m still trapped behind the wheel.
The people I love keep disappearing through empty doorways.
There is a face I used to trust and a stranger who plans to do me harm.
II.
The space between bedtime and morning becomes a tunnel
through my brain. As I sleep, I wander corridors in search of symbols that will show
me all the ways I haven’t healed, dig through chests in childhood bedrooms
whose furniture shifts every time I blink my eyes. Where is the map
my teacher gave me in twelfth grade? Where is the key I found
buried at the bottom of a poem I wrote when I was nine?
Where is the door that leads out into daylight?
I can’t open my eyes wide enough so I run my hands along the walls
as my feet stumble into a run, as every door swings open into nothing
but bottomless black. The corridor loops around my skull in a spiral
staircase that drops its steps beneath my feet like loose teeth
and my feet catch on the gaps until I’m crawling
upward on all fours in circles around a tower
that’s collapsing from the bottom up.
III.
You promised me rest for body, mind, and soul,
You who tore the temple down and built it back up in three days.
Come then. Syphon out the dark through keyholes,
snap the rafters’ spines, shatter every watching window’s eye.
I want to lie down to sleep in the center of this rubble if it means
the light will finally get through.
Elle Rosamilia grew up in upstate New York, spent years in North Africa and the UK after college, and now works as a bookseller in Mississippi. Her debut poetry collection, The Mourner’s Almanac, explores seasons of grief and hope. She has poems published in Prosetrics, Vessels of Light, and others.
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Image: A Dreaming Girl by Chaïm Soutine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Heart of Flesh Literary Journal 