Anne Riesenberg
What She Dreams the Month He Moves into the White House
She dreams her mother discovers the moon.
She dreams about a queen. A famous poet. Her husband asking can he play with the poet’s hair after he’s already done so.
She dreams inside a benzodiazepine cloud. At sea in the shallows an amoeba a flicker. All those dreamless years without sleep.
She dreams someone gives her a fence a folded stack of clear plastic slats.
She dreams what she lost in the womb.
She dreams a ramshackle house. A woman pulls her into an empty room and kisses her hard. She is astonished by the equatorial fizz their mouths make. When the woman asks her to sing she cannot.
She dreams about wildflower honey rooms full of noise.
She is sleepless. She sleeps without dreams. Three mornings she wakes, upper lip clenched in her teeth.
She dreams a dangerous road. A mirror full of sky. A charcoal drawing of her daughter’s arms encircling the cat.
She dreams she is speaking a language she doesn’t know. There’s a door. A ticket she needs to get through.
She dreams of acting without hesitation. Running down a hill a rolled up rug under her arm.
She dreams an open door. A lilac sweater. An old stove. The poet again. Writing a poem in her nightgown.
She dreams a bedroom. Her friend back from Tanzania heaps of blue beads on a blanket. Another woman weaving loops of beads through her hair.
She dreams the man just made president in his underwear grabbing her crotch.
She dreams a seal with aquamarine spots slithering through the backyard in the snow. When she describes what she’s seen no one believes her.
She dreams a fortress. Row upon row of pale concrete blocks.
She dreams a bridge. A man standing at the gate demanding payment to cross.
She dreams a taxi ride with her sister 4 blocks cost $11.28. She is upset the driver doesn’t care her sister doesn’t offer to chip in still she is in a dream with her sister and it isn’t terrible.
She dreams inside her cells a loosening.
The night of the refugee ban the world she dreams feels more real than the one she’d been living all day.
She is walking across no man’s land in a war-blackened field. Bodies emerge from the mud. Swords slice through her clothes. Her hands are empty. She lets herself bleed. She walks farther than ever before.
She dreams about the queen again. Long strips of red and gold silk flutter across her face as she moves towards the queen, who is lying on her bed in a robe. The queen is young again freshly bathed, gesticulating about justice and freedom.
She dreams she is walking along a frozen waterfall watching people slide down the ice on pieces of cardboard. When she gets back to her car they are snorting cocaine off the hood.
She makes them clean up. She makes them leave. She can’t escape how lonely she feels.
Anne Riesenberg‘s recent work has appeared in The Maine Review, The Blueshift Journal and Naugatuck River Review. She won the 2016 Blue Mesa Review nonfiction contest. She practices acupuncture in Portland, Maine.
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