By Emi – Dreamcatcher highlights experience of abuse and ableism, the tendency of trauma to manifest in nightmares long into the future of survivors and the resiliency found in awareness of what we’ve been through. A reading of this poem will be in video format on our youtube channel.
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mud logged
leaves weaved through
my fingers at
6:30 AM I
shuttled their browned
skeletons to the
wheeled bin
the
morning kind
enough to
blanket my
red face and the brine on my cheeks the
porch light drooled across wet
grains of concrete
as the sun soared in on black
wings
to,
glare at us through
overcast

I woke
up colic
the car
engine scraped my
ears kitchen lights clawed at
my eyes
air cracked against my
lungs
an ocean of
thoughts locked behind a
speech impediment
Maybe that was why he hated me.

we
hung hoops of woven
webs through wounded
doorways to keep dreams a
refuge to
hide from to
build a home within our heads outside our house

until I was old
enough to leave

the air pricked my head like goose feathers
jet lagged I
had skin on my hands but no feeling
in a room so empty it startled me
and I remained safe with my hair
trickling between blinking eyes
under bunk rafters
behind deadbolts

in my sleep he crawled
back in
dreams starved of
detail like a
prison cell
just
him and I
then him and I again
him and I
him and I
him and I
him and I
him and I on
it dragged

one night he
gripped my
hair
shoulders, arms
choking my
motion
until I
dug the words from the
depths of my
ocean

“You can’t hurt me.”

He asks why.

“Because this is a dream.”

I woke up.