A Dream

Mary Meriam

A northwest current cut the heat in half
so cold could bloom and gust in cedar boughs.
I sleep with fleece on head and feet, my cat
curled in my arm’s fleece pit. As midnight bows
to early hours, heat of fleece awakes
a dream. As walls dissolve, her face appears,
as promised once. The trip begins. She shakes
my strength. Where do I wait? How many years?
I only know the fleece has fled, and she,
her body’s heat, her body here, through bad
valleys too foul for visions, blankets me.
Are night and day the sum of dreams I had?
But this is true. I see her face to kiss,
and so I kiss her. Never wake from this.

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Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Her new collection is Pools of June (Exot Books, 2022). Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, Subtropics, and The Poetry Review.