I took too long to interpret them,
so the dreams stopped coming.
One that lingers is of the two
stray kittens, forgotten without food.
At the center of the dream is my future
body—the old anxiety again.
One of the kittens grows an abscess so foul
it almost ends the dream.
Unfazed by hunger, the other soaks in light
like a cloud. Eyes green as distance.
I run between them like a clown.
Useless as a paper sailboat.
Near the end, my body is a house
of idle organs—a void desert mountain.
Maybe the cats were men—
maybe I was their mother.
And doesn’t every dream mother write
not one, but two, biographies?
A writer once said when endings fail
it’s because you haven’t made a decision.
I’ve decided the dream was a prison
that once was a garden—or a young
old woman’s bargain.