Bolivia Series, Woman in Red,
Pastel, by John Cummings
Younger Dreams
I used to dream I was looking
for a corner in which to hide and pray
to a god I would awaken. I remember
being chased by boys with familiar faces, boys
with no faces. A grinning sailor who leaned me
against a ship’s stern, then,
red-eyed, pinned me against the boat,
nailing my wrists to the mast
to watch me bleed out in the ocean spray.
Once, my imam laid me down in his pulpit,
forced a fork against my chest, the skin
flaying open like the holy Koran. Sometimes
I’d feign death; always, I ran. In reality,
fleeing was a drug I saved
for crises: the leering eye, the doting eye,
the stare drenched in love. An oxy can be a cure
or a death. So can a boy. Afternoons, you,
rocking above me, your thick locks
cradling my fingers in their nest. I hate to admit
the tight gnashing mouth of terror was there in my heart
even then. Like a good addict, I’ve kept it
secret. But a secret, too, can be a cure, or a death.
______________
Elina Kumra
Review by Jared Pearce
On the one hand, I guess I wouldn’t mind knowing a little more about this speaker because we move from the dream to the maybe demon to the wonderful gnashing mouth. On the other hand, once I get to the secret, maybe I don’t really worry about the dream so much.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
It takes great courage to open the distorted world to our dreams, to ourselves and others. Sometimes the burden is too heavy to be kept inside. The unsettling feeling that the standard/recommended interpretations are everything but. We pray to God to wake us up and return to reality, we pray to another God to let us sleep and forget the same reality from which those dreams originated. We fake, we feign death – Every profound spirit needs a mask (from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil). Paganism has never fully left us, and the writer tells us that none of those deities can help, not drugs, not love, not rushing around, not religion, not noise, not silence; nothing seems to break the impasse between cure and death where cure and death are perceived as two sides of the same coin. And indeed they are, as we hear from many other voices in this issue.
But it gets easier, time can and will soften our sleep, the damaged tissue of our rest, making it malleable, habitable, and turning nagging scars into familiar companions and trusted compass. Paradoxically, time is something that always seems to escape youth – with too much of it on their hands to be able to factor it in and have faith in it.