Three Dreams
BY CARA DEES

First it was Champ –
our seventeen-hand Morgan with one good eye – neck-deep

in a sandpit in a green wheat field.
Sand buried him from teardrop hoof to shoulder.

Only the rigid head left,
and the gentle, burning eye. I did nothing while the sand

crushed silently. And Champ
also silent, despite his steady aching. His desertion.

*

Then it was my grandfather –
driving up the gravel road (dustless somehow) in his gold

cadillac and picture-perfect
moustache. I blinked and a frame edged in around him,

sealed him off
with antique lacquer, and he nothing more

than an inversion, a sliver
of the fifties’ radiant decay, a hard echo in the glass.

*

And myself –
I dream too often – rows of ovens unbolting,

one by one, their large,
bald, concentric throats – or dirt’s blunt bitterness

prying my mouth open,
to lump itself inside, to glue limb to pale root –

and me grinning all the while,
as though I kept catastrophe cupped tight in the heart.

*

And still the snowstorms
shear our house, icing tiles to the grass, while the oldest maple

taps his lean finger
on my bedroom window. And you still bloom inside me,

folded in utero, locked nerve
and bone to disordered chorus. Sweet evidence, you can’t hear

the wind gnawing the eaves ragged,
or catch the slow, cold flutes pulling us into deep slumber.

---

Cara Dees is an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University and studied Creative Writing, English,
and French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has worked as an English teacher in
southern France, as well as a farmhand and pony trainer in Wisconsin, and is currently Editor
of Comics and Co-Editor of Poetry at Nashville Review. Her poetry is also forthcoming in The
Journal.