Carol M. Highsmith, Remnants of a previous forest fire in Yellowstone National Park, in the northwest corner of the western state of Wyoming, 2015
Digital photograph
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
The dream says instead of alphabetizing flower names
as a relaxation technique, why not give disasters a try:
avalanche is easy. Broken home, a terrible name for
the kind of rift that does or doesn’t bring the house down.
Cataclysm, drunkenness; epiphany a kind of disaster
in how it disorders the day—your afternoon skewed
or skewered by sudden knowing. The full magnitude
of your misconception tilting the yard, glazing
every grass blade. Flood. Galactic harassment, galactic merge,
galactic quench. Galaxies in general are violent, notes the dream.
Hurricane. Are you still awake, the dream wants to know.
I am you say, moving on to J. Juddering bridge. Kryptonite.
Lava in every fissure. Is this calming you down?
it asks. Mudslide. Nocturnal tornado. Organ failure.
Not really, you say.
Pandemic, remember that?! Quake.
Robot takeover. Singularity, it’s called. Tsunami, another
easy one. Unforgiving ego. What even is that, asks the dream.
Never you mind, you tell it. Violence. Wildfire. X: the end
of an affair. Yowl. That’s a stretch, the dream submits.
Focus on the zz inside the blizzard, you tell it. The dream
is unsettled by the placement of your letters. The dream
leaves something uncomfortable in your left hip again.
A pinch that appears to originate where you feel it,
but in real life it starts in the lumbar spine. “In real life,”
laughs the dream. Okay. IN REAL LIFE, you insist,
imagining how the snow would melt around you if you
lay down in it, unclothed.