Wound Awakening for Thunder Moon

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

I didn’t remember the owl until he brought me the book about owls that he’d never shown interest in before.

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Colin See-Paynton
Owl-Light

I remembered that we discovered him by ripping up the old wood. It was rotted, but then we went too far, we ripped up the good wood, too. I didn’t rip it up, but I did stand by, not preventing it, and I watched the impulsive and hasty thrashing. I realized the baby owl was living inside, “Wait! Stop!” I implored. Perhaps the ripping-up was part of his birth. He flailed around panicked at the new freedom and in his haste to escape the careless freneticism.  He behaved as if just learning to use his wings. He’d been trapped and now needed to exercise his strength. Frightened, he flew to a nearby tree and looked back at those who ripped up his home, eyes wide. I was next to them, but not with them. I, too, stood apart and looked back at them, eyes wide with fear.  The owl’s feathers were brown and white, almost stripes, a most beautiful and unusual configuration.

Steve Reinke

I was having dinner at a restaurant I used to frequent. I thought you never went there any more out of a distaste born of shame. You decided to hate the place instead of yourself. Truly you hated both now. I was surprised to see you there, eating with some friends. (Including some old friends of mine. I don’t speak to them anymore, although I continued speaking with them too long after I discovered they were feral.) You were wearing an old baggy sweater, navy blue with some holes in it, and baggy jeans. Perhaps a hat. All slightly too large and dirty, but intentional none-the-less. You left the table to smoke a cigarette, which surprised me because you were never really a smoker before and now you had a baby. I figured if you smoked, he probably hadn’t quit. I had no feelings upon seeing you beyond my surprise at your presence and at your smoking. Perhaps satisfaction that you’d returned to the kind of filth in which you indulged before you’d ever met me. I was relieved to see you return to something truer, albeit less flattering.

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Tin Can Forest

I went outside into the snow and behind me the restaurant was the old house where my dead husband’s parents live. My friends left without me so I used my cell phone to call my father for a ride home although it was late and I worried about his driving in the snow and also wondered if he’d perhaps had one more glass of wine than prudent for driving dark, snowy roads. As I talked with him I saw one of your friends sledding down a hill and she hit a fence and screamed with pain. I saw her crash but didn’t imagine it too be so bad. She continued to writhe and scream, seemingly unable to get up. I ran over to her body in the snow, dropping my telephone with my father on the line. Dropping my way of getting home. She lay face down, a wound swelling and bleeding on the back of her skull. Other injuries to her abdomen; she tried to get up but could not. I told her not to move and went for a phone to dial an ambulance. I worried that she lay in the cold snow, but worried more about moving her. I thought to bring a blanket. I found a cell phone in the snow to call for help, but it wasn’t mine and I couldn’t unlock it. I found my phone. I felt tired and interpreted it as my reluctance to help anymore. Her friends were nowhere in sight.

You were going to travel to Greece and I saw the large, ancient stone walls rise at the coast, a dam holding back the sea. I pointed to the dark and churning waters lapping the top of the wall, hundreds of feet tall, and told you that this was the highest the sea had ever risen in history. The sky darkened grey and navy blue and the stone wall was dark and brown. People still populated the beach, they were too close to the wall to understand or see the threat. You would travel to Meteora.

Meteora

I lived in a house on the coast. I was there with two men who used to come into the restaurant, someone my friend used to affectionately call “the mayor” because of his gregarious nature and his relationships with so many townspeople. The other was a real estate agent. We all stood on the second floor of the house and looking out of the window I saw the sea rise darkly, pushing against the paneless window. There were traces of clear silicone caulk sealing this fixed panel of glass into the wall; it was never meant to open, perhaps in prescience, but the sea had never risen this high before. The storm had not even begun and the water was already threatening the integrity of the house, testing the caulk.

“You live on the coast, too, just further up. Is the water rising around your windows?” I asked the so-called mayor. “No,” he responded, seemingly unfazed. 

Steve Reinke

“I’ve been having dreams about floods,” I told you. You were in Los Angeles and I was on the East Coast, with dogs recovering from surgery. Preparing for a fireworks display that would terrify the animals, send them running for cover that they would never adequately find, shaking and panting. Years ago the fireworks were viewed as a celebration, but now, there was significant dissent among the population, who, like the dogs, found the bombast terrifying and corrupt. “I don’t think these floods are about me,” I continued. “It is a warning. A message for everyone.” 

We continued our conversation, but your manner changed. You were alerted and concerned because your dog was pacing. He needed something, although the answer to his interrogative was unclear, it was not quite his usual behavior. You decided to take him outside and returned my call after a few moments.

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The Dove Sent Forth From The Ark by Gustave Dore

As we talked your room began to move. It continued. The floor shook, the clothes swayed in your closet. You needed to sit down.

These earthquakes continued for the next days, opening a massive fissure in the earth. The large crack extended from an area that apparently held water before. The erosion patterns on the desert sand indicate that some of that water was sucked out. The giant crack isn’t the only evidence that the region’s topography has permanently changed.

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Tin Can Forest

You tried to hang yourself again. He had to take the belts and scarves rigged around the apartment. You screamed violence at him and he left shaking. Everyone wanted to call an ambulance, but we prevented that from happening. I don’t know if your physical safety is of most importance, but I continue behaving as if it were. Once people came to get you, to look after you, you remained often angry and secretive. This happened before. Six months ago, but before that too, and it would happen again. It is your shame. You’ve decided to hate things and to hate yourself, repeating the story over and over in prayer. It pulls you into the fissure that’s opened in the earth.  I wish you were guilty instead. Alchemizing the sickening yellow of loathing into a charcoal lump of regret. After all, charcoal is useful.

Steve Reinke

I spoke to you yesterday and you said the same things you’ve always said, writhing in the snow, head bleeding. All the while insisting you’re fine.

The dog pulled out his stitches. Again. Reopening the wound that never healed.

Cats and Hawks

The Unicorn Defends Itself

My grandmother adopted a baby.

She had a sunroom filled with plants.

The baby was sometimes a white cat. There were other cats, too. And also birds, un-caged. These were not ordinary birds, but instead had fantastical plumage indicating either a unique native wildness or a specialized exotic cultivation. Red parrot-like animals and hawks with beaks bright like tropical fish or Floridian lipstick. Owls with exaggerated black tufts rising from their herringbone plumage.

I thought my grandmother, being ninety-five years old, might expire sooner than this new baby’s needs.

The white cat was among the other cats and as a group it was difficult to suppress their predatory urges towards these birds. But these were no ordinary birds. They were large hunters and they sat in the plants in the sunroom. If something were out of place, a bit of wind, an errant hair, it could give rise to panic and compulsion. Terror and ecstasy.

One brown striped cat submitted to chase and leapt after the long-legged red animal in the corner, erupting into a dervish whirling: feathers and fur. I tried to usher the birds through the door into the windowless hallway, but being too large for the space, too magnificent, their wings could only be compromised by the walls and the ceiling. Eventually they made it through with the owl struggling the longest, perhaps sustaining the most injury.

I walked back through the calm sunroom and wondered if this collection, these plants and in some part the animals too were the segue to death and in that sense if they were nature.

 

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

Hope

He sat next to me on the lawn chairs positioned on the gentle, grassy rise above the lake. The colors took on their richer, darker aspects because of the dusk. They seemed at once more grounded and more magical. I thanked him for having been president. I was surprised by the welling up in my throat, clotting the words. The simple meaning I anticipated defied by bodily experience. His eyes welled up, too. He had not intended that he become so indispensable. He was not moved because his ego was touched by my show of emotion, instead, he felt a kind of compassion for me, as representative of those whom he had let down. In a flash of expression, a slight down turn of his mouth and dilation of his pupils, I understood his kind of leadership. Success could only mean that once he was finished, the edifice would remain standing, impervious to the absence of his hand, insensible to it’s withdrawal.

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Sunset Norway Point by Alan Bray

He sat slightly above me, slightly behind me, on the hillside. He held my hand as we looked out onto the still water. People played in the waning light. They too, taking on a deeper glow.

As if from nowhere, I did not see them coming and could not tell you from which direction, a group of men ridiculed the former president for holding my hand. They insinuated something untoward. Not because they noticed it, but because they were clustered together and of one mind, and it was a practiced mind. Practiced at attack and slander and vulgarity. Practiced at the en masse conversion of those impulses into reality. Manifestation.

Harbinger by Alan Bray

I felt deeply uncomfortable. The manifestation had been a success, for I felt ashamed. The president, however, he continued to hold my hand, his gaze over the calm, dark, lake water unwavering. I felt my shame run down my arm and pulse through my hand, tempted to pull it from his and abandon the peace. This is how infection spreads, but it stopped there in his palm. He did not tighten his grasp or loosen it. He did not continue in reaction. He just continued. The itching small spasms in my hand, slowly dissipating, perhaps through sweat from my palm. The tightening in my arm that would bend my elbow and pull away, it too relaxed again.

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Spring Thaw by Alan Bray

I stopped looking back at him, but instead adopted his gaze toward the water.

 

 

 

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

You told her you’d built the house.

She was in my old bedroom at the time, in her underwear.  She defended her indefensible actions as a way of confronting me, defense being her preferred mode of aggression. She stood on her hands, leaning her crossed legs on the wall. This disrupted the pile of books that had been stacked tidily, but she didn’t seem to notice. She yelled wildly between her poses and postures, pupils dilated and eyes wide. She waved her arms, hands punctuated by fists, muscles tense and striving. You sat quietly, ill at ease, on the edge of my old bed. She looked franticly back and forth between us, expecting your corroboration. “You never built that house! He did everything!” She introduced your material and technical skills as evidence. She dismissed, based on grounds of invisibility and immateriality, the notions of planning and organization. Also of paint, even if color did not fit perfectly into invisibility, one could get away with arguing against light these days, the political climate being what it is. Paint itself, when applied to a wall, was so thin, so insubstantial.

Her gaze demanded you join in, but you looked away and toward the ground, silent. Would you have to admit you’d lied? I wondered, but quickly decided that would be no revelation, in fact, it was the very premise and mode of attraction. This performance was the engine keeping things running.

I countered, describing the work I’d done, which I immediately regretted, preferring to leave you both to your storytelling, because I realized it was now impervious.

I shouldn’t have been in there anyway, despite it being my childhood home. I backed away and closed the door.

I scribbled notes in the dark with crayons on torn out sheets of lined paper from a spiral notebook, tossing each page to the side once I’d finished and starting fresh. I moved around the circle of children also drawing in the darkened pre-dawn, but then I spoke to my friend. “Go back to your drawings, there’s a code,” she advised. I rifled through the stack of papers I’d left on the floor, trying to remember something I knew I’d just known. “Remember to remember.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

 

She told me he was sick by way of explaining his behavior.

He’d been creating drama in his family, particularly with his wife.

I watched the eggs become firm in the pan and I moved them around with the spatula.

by Ravi Zupa

She said he knew his diagnosis and this was his way of being remembered.

The eggs began sticking to the pan, just a papery sliver of gold, I delivered the rest to a dish waiting nearby. I tried to remove what was left in the pan. The brittle sheets flaked dry pieces, nothing to salvage.

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

I was surprised when I caught a glimpse of your new shoes.

LIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

It had been years since I’d seen you and we pretended not to know one another, which I suppose was not truly pretense. I looked over my shoulder as we passed one another and saw the high heel of your pale blue shoe and the shine of your pant cuff. You joined your family at the table where we used to eat. I continued my work purposefully after this sad interruption only now wondering at the deflective sheen of your uncannily foppish attire.

They Tested Your Cortisol Levels

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

They were among the highest ever seen and you wondered that they tested them at all. Machines pulsed. You wished they’d tested something else, measured it. You saw the apparatus, the tubes of green fluid rising and falling like breath, only somehow unnatural. This made you think that not all life was from nature as some would have you believe, or at least it’s origins did not have some state that was more of nature than its current incarnation. You wondered that they did not test instead your intelligence, something they would just as soon deny and certainly not so easily pathologize. You knew, though, that your intellect might be as dangerous to your health. You picked at your skin and considered just how the green fluid measured that level of disturbance that came through. That measured the quality of that final barrier, however illusive, between you and them.

Cleaning

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

We were cleaning up our property which was like a crossroads where you see strangers in a campgrounds. My former neighbor was walking her dog near the perimeter and I wanted to say hello, but I also wanted to not be seen, to just watch her. She was older but still had the same walk and the same hairstyle, the same glasses and smile, walking her dog as she had ten years ago. Once she passes out of my eyesight I get back to the task of cleaning. The yard has not only been untended, it’s has been an active dumpsite of domestic waste.  Drugs and kitchen utensils are the first targets and we are making progress, but there is so much to get rid of and I am sweating now, but I’m not tired of doing it.  I’m still not sure what I’m looking for in this mess. There is an auditorium stage that appears to my far right opposite to where I was watching my neighbor walk her dog. It’s light oak and I’m drawn to it, so I walk towards it. I get closer and I see discarded odds and ends that look like I might save something. There’s a kids’ sand shovel without its bucket. My two year old might use it even though I don’t think it’s hers and when I get closer I grab that shovel, but its covered in dust and something sticky so I immediately put it back down. All of my friends and family are helping me clean up at this stage and it’s going more quickly than I can approve or disapprove of discarding, one by one, the items. So I’m a little worried that they’re just getting rid of things that I want to keep. I reach for and look at a stack of papers on the stage because they have foreign stamps and it looks like I have kept them for a long time. At first I, when I open envelopes, I see they contain letters and they’re letters my ex-husband and I wrote to one another other when I was his college student, but then I look closer. They seem to change. They’re the divorce papers and I wonder if it is all over and if this is actually my MeToo moment and I wonder what’s left for my daughter.

Measured

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

I was with some friends and we were looking at my hair and we were measuring how long my hair was to see if it needed to be cut and when they measured it they told me that it was down to just above my butt and I was very shocked and upset and I told them that it was too long. It was too long for my hair. That it needed to be cut closer to my boobs.