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by Nicole Callihan In the dream, you came to me. The barn was a barn I fell asleep in as a child, or drove by years later, milky-eyed from days of road, or it was just the grasses where a barn once stood before the fire tore through. Do you remember the fire? There is so much to consider and re-consider. In the dream, you cracked me open with your fingers and ran your thumbs across the wound I am. The sky of the dream was a dream sky. Under it, we swelled and swallowed, as the gnats flew into our eyes, and the flies buzzed our ears. From the well of you, I drank, and drank, until I was drunk on sweetgrasses and rainwater, on the skin of the inside of your wrist, the glass tin pails, horses of copper. And if I had not dreamed all this, I would be sure it was a dream, and my sleeping child self, under rafters and wool, would turn and settle, and hours later, waking, she wouldn’t remember anything for decades.  photo by Amanda K. Field Nicole Callihan’s books include SuperLoop (2014), and the chapbooks: A Study in Spring (2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), and Aging (2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Painted Bride Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her latest project, Translucence, a dual-language, cross-culture collaboration with Palestinian poet Samar Abdel Jaber, was released by Indolent Books in 2018. Find her on the web at www.nicolecallihan.com. |